Saseal weird we both work in QA and I feel your pain under staffed and over worked is a constant phrase.

As for chat filters that have been suggested, I assume you would filter specific phrases out key being gil. So then the seller changes his tells to g!l you filter that which then goes back and forth for all eternity, bleieve me I used to play Xi when this first started becoming a problem and it started as English and gradually degraded into the mess you see in XIV. You are right killing the market is nigh impossible and other companies have tried and SE in the past during the days of Xi even went after a few of them directly. Sadly most of them are oversees where jurisdiction gets iffy.

Its a difficult problem one that has no real long term solution in any game that has a currency. restricting new players to no tells seems like a good idea until you realize this just slows the problem as the sellers would then just level the characters up and believe me they have the time and manpower to do it very rapidly. Every solution has potential drawbacks and time needed to implement with none being an end all be all to this problem. I also suspect that they will be looking at implementing a few of these features in the near future or possibly ones that are even better but every implementation takes development time which means time away from additional content.