Even a delay is worth of doing... Do you think that it should remain so easy as it is now? Because I don't think so... If someone has to go see the report of his bot and starts manually logging them and doing the quest... It is a pain... And it is slow, slower than like it is right now. So, yes, would work, it is better than surrender and let it be like it is right now.
1- It is not really such a hard work, waste of time and money... Editing quests or making them is awesomely easy... Or at least it was for me, of course I aknowledge which kind of motor or programming language SE uses in FFXIV. But adding such a thing would cost me three hours in my former game, in lazy mode.
2- Seriously, I still don't seeing what's the problem in having limited the communications until reaching a certain level, people RARELY TALK their first hours of game, they are rather discovering the world, learning everything that the game gives them in an already well explained information and support help... And they just want to be alone. But, okay, we could reduce even more the level of this and just do the quest to fool the botts and make it so the ones behind bots would have to manually activate things, that's the important stuff.
I appreciate your commend & comment in this thread, but... Think on this, that "entire staff that is employed to work" bla bla bla, are... Yes, are humans, they are humans too, maybe their work is to think on ideas, but what's true is that not everyone can come always with ideas, we will always need the help of others, that's why we can put suggestions in the forums after all... Many of the things I managed to do was thanks to ideas that players told me in the forums, even, if their ideas were not accurated, I reformed them and made my own, but still, it was a help I appreciated. As I said, I had to work alone in an environment where whatever I did could be exploited by players and I had to think a lot and realize the pros and bads of everything I was about to do, or to quickly fix whatever I could forgot, or to directly comment with the community.
I'm not telling them what to do, neither telling them what they need, my will is just to help and try to ease their work a little, at least however I can help or contribute to this, because I understand how damn annoying is to work in this and have damn spammers trying to mess up all what you are working and have spent hours working for.
Your idea 1 is surrender and do nothing but block a good feature of the game... I think that it is worse than block it from level 1 to 10 and do a quest... But, uh, okay...
Your idea 2... Would be even more complicated than making a whole quest, and useless because they could easily change the messages as they often do.....
Option 3... Utopia, whatever that includes as option "Try to convince everyone" is a really worthless and almost impossible thing to do, of course, this would indeed end with RMT, but what's more difficult? Trying to prevent it and battle or trying to convince people to ignore it? It ain't happen, this is like trying to convince all the people to don't commit crimes.. Would it work? Yes, if you can really convince them to stop commit crimes.... Do you really think your ideas are more worth than the others explained in this threat?... Well, it is only opinions right now...
I think people tend to think some things are too difficult and that's what don't let them advance.