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Filter bubbles are still a thing, but they mostly filter by ideology, not by obnoxiousness.
I think a large point of it is that many online interactions are one-off. In the non-iterated prisoner's dilemma, defection is a viable strategy.
If you had a constant group below Dunbar's number, then everyone would learn who the main assholes are and employ any number of strategies (server bans, teaming up vs them, dropping out of games when they join, teamkilling them) against them to effectively push them out of the group.
I predict that for most casual games, there should be an obvious solution: fill the game with bots. Most of the chat is nothing which LLMs could not manage, and training a neural net to play like a noob or mid-level player should not be very hard. Or you could try to use machine learning (or even plain old statistical analysis) to figure out which players are mostly causing others to drop out of the game and then put them into matches with similar players instead.
They're already filled with bots. The AI sucks though.
Games like Overwatch 2 are fairly punishing to "toxic" players, and they'll deliver a million slaps on the wrist + an eventual account ban, but this fails to solve the human organization problem here, which is: Assholes deserve to play games too. I don't want to play baseball with someone I hate, but he should still have the freedom to play baseball in his own way -- just with someone who's not me.
Overwatch, League of Legends, CS2, none of these games understand this. They're trying to enforce a universal standard of politeness onto online games, which is ridiculous, because for some people mic spamming and shouting slurs is why it's fun. Society should not be telling us, "If you can't have fun in the exact way I tell you to, you're not allowed to have fun."
CS2 has something called "Trust factor", which is an invisible metric that determines how likely you are to cheat. Matchmaking sorts players by trust factor, so if you have a low trust factor, you're getting a game full of cheaters. The question is -- why don't we do this with "toxic" players? Instead of banning them for using the gamer word, just lower their niceness score and match them into the in-game equivalent of 4chan. We created this problem with algorithms, so let's solve it with them too.
Dota 2 already does. There is what's colloquially called "hidden pools". If you get reported for flaming in chat or being obnoxious you start getting preferentially matchmaked with other such people until your hidden metric for obnoxiousness/abuse improves.
I know this because I pretty consistently play in a team with a hothead who just can't help himself but start flaming in all chat, usually the following few games we get matched next are also with people like that. When I que solo, it's fine. When we que together and he has been "a good boy [tm]" the matchmaking is fine also, until he starts talking shit again in all chat. Then it's back to the hidden pool.
I was under the impression that the low priority pool is not "hidden", but very explicit - when you go there, when you're on a premade team with someone who goes there and when your report sends someone there. Or do you mean to claim that there's a separate hidden pool on top of the explicit LP pool? Why'd they do that?
Oh there definitely is an explicit low priority pool, but before you get slapped with that one, you can be assigned a hidden pool where it just ques you with other people who are getting excessive reports be it for verbal abuse or griefing. To this day the hidden pools remain unacknowledged by valve publicly.
While they did say they have "hidden pools" for hackers and voice/text abuse in CSgo/CS2 they have not admitted to the same in Dota2. Both games are running on the same base engine and both games also are part of valve's Overwatch pseudo AI moderation system.
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