Emotes disabled - Working as intended?

[Qondar]

After yesterday's patch emotes no longer work for any of my characters.  I always trigger them with the hotkeys (F12, 1-4 for the menus, etc.), but AuroraNox hit on what seems to be the root cause:

 

" Apparently it's a part of the anti-spam bot thing that characters below level 11 can't chat, and thus can't use the emotes that are chat activated."

 

My question is, was this intended? Or is it just an oversight with the new anti-spam measures? Will emotes be restored for 1-10 characters, or are they just gone forever?

 

This post from Youmukon gives me some hope, but it's pretty vague:

 

"We are currently having an issue affecting the chat right now, our team is aware of that and currently working on addressing that problem."