“While I will agree that being called various names is annoying, since there’s the capacity in most games to mute other players or to simply turn off the volume of your tv altogether, it’s more likely that online gaming is lower for other reasons.”

Sure you can mute the players but most of the time these scumbag’s trashtalk isn’t the problem that’s disrupting gameplay, it’s teamkilling! Sure you can mute an asshole but if he is just going around killing his teammates constantly and there is no system in the game to combat this, then the game is reduced to just watching your screen as some dickwipe shoots you every time you spawn. And that’s not a game, that’s just bullshit created by incompetent developers.

Moral of the story; If you choose to make a game that allows a handful of players ruin it for everyone else, you deserve to go bankrupt!