We have support for a variety of ways to limit who can join you (passwording lobbies, locking lobbies etc). I get a lot of value playing with a regular group of friends on a Sunday night in part because of it.

I don't think that's true at all. I mainly play Rocket League, and while you do have bad games, I'd say at least 80% of them are fun.

It does benefit from:

1. Limited coms (nobody seems to use voice chat, perhaps partly because it was completely broken for years), and while you can type, it's too fast paced to write much so mostly people just use quick chats sarcastically (What a save!)

2. Games are really short (about 7 minutes). You're not losing hours of your life if you get stuck with an arsehole.

3. People play a lot of games because they're so short, so the matchmaking is very accurate usually.

Matchmaking is a real problem in most games because of smurfing.

BAR has very sophisticated anti-smurfing, so many bans to out to people who thought they could trick the system.

You occasionally get smurfs in Rocket League but it's like 1 in 10 games so not a big issue IMO.

this is completely ignoring the botting issue that was so bad lately it pushed pros out of ssl and severely messed up MMR. this season is the first one that is remotely playable in a while

Oh yeah to be fair I stopped playing for that whole period (not because of it).

That varies VASTLY depending on what skill you're at. At D3 where I am, I'd say maybe 2 out of 3 games have at least one person showing banners or skins that are exclusive to Grand Champ tournament winners.

Trackmania (in all of it's online incarnations) seems to have mostly avoided toxicity.

But I think that's because you can't really impact other players. Everyone's racing their own lines, just sharing a chat room while doing so.

What if hostility is a feature? They have a culture that works for them. Many organizations do not survive massive influx of new members - numbers inflate quickly, community adapts rules because you cannot manage a big community the way you'd manage small community, old members leave, new members get bored and also leave, the community tries to manage a small community the way you'd manage a large community, whole thing collapses. Meanwhile if you're hostile to new members you avoid unsustainably high expansion and complete collapse of the organization's management structure because there is no expansion. Expansion is not a measure of success if it sacrifices maintaining current culture. Asian societies famously function like that.

Hostility might be a feature for someone who is (or views themselves as) in an "in" clique. But it's poison for the long term health of the game, because it discourages most participation. The only ones attracted are those who view vitriol as a pleasant environment.

"Hostility as a feature" has been tried many times, from the old newsgroups of the late 80s to Quora and Stack Overflow. It tends to herald the death of the platform.

There's not much hostility in Beyond All Reason outside of certain "newbie" lobbies. Occasionally somebody has a conflict, but people who take game seriously avoid offensive words as they don't want to get banned.

There is a trend in online mobile game design, that the best interaction between players is through limited-option emotes and solo gameplay masqueraded as 'multiplayer'. That's saying something. People don't know how to give feedback that doesn't tilt someone else. They'd rather label others names instead.