The game smartly sorts players into lobbies based on their aggressiveness towards others. And this is where it diverges from real life scenarios.

Yeah, ARC Raiders has a lobby system to sort people by aggressiveness.

Which is interesting, because the early Steam reviews loved the fact that the game was mostly cooperative. Most players were helpful or neutral, but some would attempt to kill you. This meant that running into other players was tense. Would they heal you? Would they help you take down a machine? Or would they rob you? You had to guess, and guess quickly.

Then there was a big influx of Twitch viewers who were just there for PvP.

I actually think the "mostly cooperative but not always" dynamic is a really interesting vibe, but probably a hard one for the developers to maintain.

There are plenty of real life examples of this, from softball leagues that self-sort based of levels of seriousness / competitiveness / aggressiveness, to people actively avoiding going into areas like investment banking or high-pressure sales because they have a reputation of being very aggressive.

You can’t always avoid people who are aggressive towards others, but I’ve found that my life is a lot more stressful when I work with aggressive people, so I actively try to avoid these situations and work in more collaborative environments.

This is a brilliant idea that Escape from Tarkov might do well to adopt

People sort themselves into cliques and bubbles all the time?