I’ve seen this harassment all the time in non-competitive games though. Even on the PS3 playing GTAIV, when my character was a woman, people would follow me, two different times people added me, no one had when I was a male character. One of them messaged me asking if I was actually a woman lol. Obviously this is just anecdotal, but there are plenty of stats about this sort of thing.
If your view is that most people are self-centered and nasty I think you maybe need to socialize with different people. Like you said the anonymity of the internet dehumanizes people and encourages more toxic behavior, I don’t believe most people really are so toxic though.
It’s kind of baffling how we accept this as pretty much the standard for major releases these days. Why would we be okay buying anything else like this? If I bought a pair of shoes and they had issues that made them unwearable until I got them repaired I would be irritated as fuck, and obviously this would be unacceptable for a store to sell them like that.
No bikes??? I hadn’t heard that, one of the most satisfying things about playing C:S1 to me was making great bike routes and useful public transit, without bikes I really don’t feel a drive to play this one now honestly hah. Maybe they are going the Sims route where all the useful basic things they added in the previous edition will be released over time as DLC, ffs.
I wonder how much this varies depending on the amount of data it would require to store the emails of a company. I know nothing about this subject, but does it occur where companies with very large email lists would forgo storing those types of emails to save data costs?