2. 253 games of Dota 2, of which about 30% have had voice chat and only one or two have had flaming on voice chat. Note also that I'm somewhere around the middle of the "normal skill" bracket, where people are just good enough to flame things they think are stupid but aren't actually good enough to know what's stupid or not, so nearly peak flame point.
That's not what I was talking about. How many of those were mostly dead silence with an occasional cough or bit of a sentence?
Of course, given your own bias on this topic, I'm not particularly inclined to believe that ratio. :|
Shitty people are the one universal constant in online multiplayer, and they crop up a lot more often than that even in places where they honestly shouldn't. There's been precisely
one instance I've ever seen of a public game with consistently calm and helpful comms, and that was when I used to play in a CS:S server run by a really tightly wound group, where four of our regulars were admins who permabanned assholes as soon as they showed themselves and half of the people who played on it were long-time regulars.
Granted, I do think that DotA2 probably has a somewhat lower incidence rate, if only because of the paywall and potentially because it isn't Riot's shitty report-response system at work, but it ain't less than 3% of voice chat games, unless you're counting with some obtuse method where any positive communication nullifies flaming/flaming "doesn't count" if it's only one guy and doesn't persist for the whole game. People are salty, salty people rage and flame, and nothing makes people saltier than MOBAs. But heck, maybe you've been lucky.
2. Unfortunately, the plural of anecdote is not data. I'm sure there are plenty people out there who've had mostly positive interactions, but from what I've seen, also plenty who've had a mostly negative one. Even if the cliche is overblown, it's unlikely to be completely fabricated.
The truly unfortunate part is that we have to be unscientific and talk about personal experiences, because nobody with sufficient interest in the subject actually wants to waste that much of their life gathering meaningful samples about this.