Basically one person goes through and then all other people have to wait [...] like 24 real hours or so for now.
I agree that it would make sense to keep players busy in DR for a longer time than it is the case for now, but this suggestion looks greatly counterproductive to me. Allow me to make some examples.
Character A dies. The server has not been very populated recently and A can run through the DR as usual, because no one else did so during the past 24 hours. Nothing changed for this lucky one.
Player B has been playing for only a few weeks, always taking care not to do anything dangerous and mainly being busy with quests. On another trip to the eagle, he loses focus from the chat tab and accidentally hits autorun, so his character falls off the cliff. After swearing about the glitch, he finds his character spawn in death realm and explores the location with fascination. He finally makes it to the portal and finds a a small crowd of characters. Most of them vanish after a few seconds while others pop out of nowhere to take their place. He asks what they are doing here and gets the answer "[Sorry, Noob, they changed rules here. Only one player can leave this place per day. People keep loging in to check for a lift out of here. I guess you will have to keep trying for a few weeks.]" If you were player B, what would you do?
Player C participates in some
arena games event. Because the game mechanics don't allow for another simple solution to easily check for the "last man standing" rules of these games, most participants are expected to die, even though the IC background of this event does not necessarily imply the death of anyone. About 30 characters are sent to death realm, and the queue down there keeps growing.
About random emotes or chat turned to gibberish, I would say its not a good approach at all. Players who /die in purpose to just take a shortcut won't care much about this either. Anyone else will find this highly annoying especially if your character dies due to a glitch.
I conclude that if you wish to "enforce" something in this context, keep the players busy with actively doing something in death realm, such as solving some quests for earning their exit ticket. I am sure the dev team has more than one idea about future expansions of the death realm and the mechanics associated with this. Until then, I would keep things as incomplete but simple as they are for now.