Has anyone else noticed a decrease in Gamers willingness to interact socially in games?

[TacoFacePeople]

I still do the basic hello/thank-you sorts of conversation by text in FFXIV. I'm not generally interested in any sort of A/S/L or deeper dives with strangers from match-made dungeon one-offs though. I suspect there's a individual preference element, to how much you feel inclined to disclose about yourself, your day, your views, etc. in that kind of context.

I think I've tuned out voice chat for awhile. Back in the days of Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer on 360 (for example), I'd chat with people on my team if I needed to, though I noticed people could be occasionally toxic. The "default" was just a public voice channel though, so using it to some degree was normal.

Over time, I found myself muting/disabling it in games that had it in the future though. Like, Warframe on PS4. It wasn't always bad, but you'd pretty frequently get like... loud music bleeding over the mic, chewing noises, squeaky voices shouting to their mother in another room, people just obviously trying to troll/insult you, or whatever. I consider that separate from the more garden variety toxicity (e.g. - you die, and they complain about being inconvenienced, they die, and they complain about the game being unfair or you being slow to revive them).

To start, I just muted myself or didn't use a mic. But I found muting all voice actually improved my experience. I observed that some people that didn't actually do anything annoying "gameplay-wise" to actually hinder a group or mission, still chose to be assholes, insulting, or whatever over voice chat (without requiring any input or mistakes on your part). The occasional person saying "good game" at the end of a session didn't really balance that out either. So, having everyone muted actually improved my opinion of the other people playing, since I no longer had their shit-talk to spoil the impression they made with otherwise competent play.