Seems you never really figured out the difference between strangers and friends/acquaintances.
^ This is the real problem with “solo queues”, which can be seen in AV as well, and especially in retail all over the place due to the way they’ve ignored the social design aspect of the game for such an extremely long time.
Xrealm is also bad for this very same reason, because you get used to forgetting the names you play with/against, which in turn affects the way you behave.
So this anonymity nonsense, as stated in the quote from the report, increases toxic sub-groups.
This takes shape in ways like “Do X, then Y, but watch out for Z!” because that’s one individual’s or group’s perception of “the way to play well”, so when others doesn’t obey those “commands”, it breeds resentment because this creates the perception that the people not playing as “suggested” are actively damaging the success rate. So this quickly breeds toxic outbursts because they reject the out-groups of players that doesn’t share the same perception of the way to play it. Especially when things doesn’t go well because of the lack of successful coordination or simply playing worse than the opposition, this really fuels the fire quickly.
Then there is a separate problem, where you don’t even bother trying to create an identity in the content, so you ignore the chat completely and doesn’t even read what’s said if you even bother having it be shown in the first place. This creates an isolated gameplay experience, like the solo aRPG retail has become almost all over the place.
Same answer to this.
You can read more about why xrealm convenience is so bad for the matchmaking, and what we’re actively losing out on because of it, in this thread:
I’m not saying you can’t create social designs involving pugs. I’m not saying it’s inherently bad. But it’s actively harmful in this giant pool of anonymity, where you reduce your awareness to yourself while completely ignoring everything else and actively reject anything that you perceive is harming your own experience.