i remember never being allowed to naturally learn how to play dota on warcraft 3 because every time i'd buy an item i wasn't supposed to or walk in the wrong direction all 4 members of my team would call me a dumb faggot and leave, hostility hasn't really changed much for random anonymous internet people that are super into competitive game genres other than there being more of them
I don't blame players for getting defensive. 'Addressing' the problem of game-wide 'toxic' behavior almost always seems to translate into ineffective attempts at micromanagement from corporate suits who only care about avoiding unflattering media headlines about their game(s). Banning a few streamers or high-profile players, overemphasizing some vague, unevenly-enforced regime of 'etiquette', encouraging snitching which in practice will be used to hash out personal vendettas instead of actually remove problematic players, etc. They know damn well that stuff doesn't work.
this however is the much bigger problem we have now. players and communities no longer have control over who they include interacting with them, the responsibility is entirely on the large company in power over the game. a company has entirely different goals and ethics in regard to what they can publicly find "acceptable behavior" and so while in the 90's you could be playing quake on a community server hearing some player over crackly dial-up teamspeak being a cunt and have a basic social process to see if the general opinion is to kick/ban that guy or go to a different server with different values; you can't contact a company and say "this guy hurt my feelings cause he was being a cunt" and have anything happen, that guy's a shit nugget floating in an ocean of normal players (that might have just been having a bad day at the time) that you could end up playing with at any time, and unless they want to appear pliable and easy to manipulate into banning people they can't play favorites with who they listen to unless it's making them look bad on a wider PR scale.
games no longer have a focus on individual communities they have "fans of that game" that may or may not play it frequently, may or may not be pieces of shit, and may or may not need their speaking privileges revoked; all from a random mix of backgrounds, countries, and ethnicities. you pretty much
can't deal with a situation at this large of a scale without stepping on a shitload of peoples toes at once, leading to arcane 1984-levels of strict rulesets that are enforced at random whenever the outcry gets too bad or worse; automatically enforced solutions to social behavior that only leads to people being quiet as opposed to being people worth interacting with or people that expose their own shitty behavior. this is how you get players like
this pro dota 2 player (at the bottom playing phantom lancer) who is regularly known for playing extremely well for 90% of a game and randomly deciding to wordlessly kill himself, sell all of his items, and AFK to let his team lose (as opposed to leaving which gives your resources/character to your team). in any smaller game community in the past this situation would last a couple weeks, tops. an admin eventually would be called, there'd be warnings, bans, permabans, blacklists, pretty much the second they became known as the guy that throws games all the time.
however now with how punishment situations are dealt with, you give people like this guy a line to skirt. if you tell people they can get reported two times a week, they just won't get reported three times a week. if you tell them they can't say "nigger" they just won't say nigger, instead saying other racist terms that are more subtle or not affected by any automated systems. you can't give people a defined limit to how awful how often they can be, or else it's basically an allowance that some people might consider they're wasting if they don't use. on the other hand you also can't give people too fuzzy a line and play every situation by ear if you have millions of players to take care of.
reward mechanisms that allow players to earn things by having other players recognize them as good people worth playing with seem to work a lot better, with groups of players (collectors, completionists, fashion/status people) automatically being drawn to whatever dumb cosmetic content they lock behind 500 "you rock!" stickers that the system defines as being given out to players that are worth interacting with. this gives players a skinner box-like compulsion to at the very least attempt to be pleasant and helpful and tends to make it their default behavior when talking to other random anonymous players, the difference between a league of legends player that's fishing for a commendation and one that hates anything that isn't the "you win" screen coming up is massive and it's easier to fuel that response than it is to change people by censoring and banning them.
