These days, online public lobbies are almost always hostile. Doesn't matter the game, either. You can ban words, phrases, etc. The hostility is also through actions and not just insults.

The only way to have actual fun gaming is a private group of friends. Think lan party, and definitely not public.

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.

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.