>Valeknar specifically asked me why I thought tells were
>verbal. I told him.

Yeah, it was pretty dumb of me to not immediately think of deafness. I don't think that sleep has anything to do with it though, since group chat does work despite unconsciousness.

In point of fact, I really dislike emotes in tells either, but I don't think that tells are so well-defined that you can say that they're categorically invalid.

>The fact that tells don't work while deaf is clear-cut proof
>that tells require hearing to work, isn't it?

Not really. There are a lot of vague approximations in this game and how the various forms of deafness work is one. I do agree that tells are mostly auditory, but I think it's a mistake to pretend like there isn't more to it than purely sonic mechanisms.

To use logic similar to your own, doesn't the fact that you know whether they're able to hear you, and sometimes why (because of deafness or sleeping, or being in Organia) show that there's more to it than sound alone? If it was just sound you wouldn't get that feedback. And you can't have it both ways and say that those things are just side-effects of technical limitations but the rest of the stuff you cited isn't.

I'll take back that tells could have a visual component, but I'd still argue that they have a mental-link component, and an empty or, uh, elliptical (?) tell is perfectly logical within the context of the game and has meaning.