Idea for limiting plat spammers

[Sola]

<p>It's obvious that plat spammers take advantage of creating free trial accounts, logging in game, and setting bots up to spam people across the server.  SOE does not want to limit the ability for new players to chat with their buddies who are much higher level and not on the Island and I understand why.</p><p> So, my proposal is to limit those who create new free trial characters to only be able to return tells off the island only after a live account has sent them a tell.</p><p>  This would provide 2 things;</p><p>1.) it would limit the activity of spam bots spamming all of us in game</p><p>and the nice kicker here:</p><p>2.) It would allow the gm's to track who is initiating tells to known spam bots!!!  So if the spammers care to continue this practice, their real pharm accounts could be identified and banned =)</p><p>Thanks!</p>

[EpokSilvermo]

Update Notes from September 1, 2006: <blockquote><span style="color: #ffcc00"><b>*** Trial of the Isle Changes ***</b></span> The Trial of the Isle is a free demo of EverQuest II that gives players a chance to try out the game. Unfortunately, some unscrupulous individuals have been using the Trial to perform actions that break the End User License Agreement, such as spamming legitimate players. In order to prevent many of these abuses, Trial accounts now have certain limitations placed upon their ability to interact with other players. These limitations go away when the Trial player subscribes to the game. <b>Trial of the Isle players:</b> - Cannot send /tells to players on other servers or games - Must be on someone's friends list in order to send /tells to them - Cannot trade with other players - Cannot be invited into guilds - Cannot create a guild or assist in the creation of a guild - Cannot purchase items from the broker or from consignment vendors - Cannot list items for sale on the broker - Cannot send or receive in-game mail - Cannot talk in server-wide chat channels (level channels, class channels, etc.) <span style="color: #ffcc00"><b>*** User Interface ***</b></span> - There is now a Report Spam button in the mail window. Using this button will delete the message, any attachments it has, and will report it to Customer Service for investigation.</blockquote>

[Sola]

<p>That's all well and good, but it appears free trial accounts can still send tells to those on the same server as them.  This feature appears to not have been affected as we constantly get bombarded with tells such as noted in this article:</p><p><a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=364773" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=364773</a></p>