That's certainly an encouraging start. My worry is as hilarious pointed out - gaining 1 merit is easy. Even if they can't trade between alts, they can easily beg, buy, or plagiarize for a single merit. A 20% reduction is great, but only if it continues. As the system stands, that 20% will slowly fall as more and more of the spambies start to level up again. Not only would a 10 merit requirement reduce that rate of fall significantly, it would likely result in a further reduction of spam as many of the newbies still spamming in the hope of gaining 1 random merit would just give up entirely if they knew they had to reach 10, as well as knocking out many multiple account users who would not have enough merit to level up all their alts.