There's a serious problem with the community, and it comes down to the community rarely being given the tools to deal with them.
It's obtuse enough reporting the morons who use dicks and swastikas for emblems(Competitor Battlefield does it even worse). But the series has stripped out features like dedicated servers over time (With some half-assessed compromises with regards to private servers and dedicated servers) and worse, Ranked dedicated servers, which don't allow the community to police itself. I used to play with a clan, I met the guys playing on their server, and they recruited me. Their server was lots of fun, and since it had moderation, hackers, and morons who came there to troll, got banned. Additionally, playing pubs with a clan, or playing pugs within a roster, where most of the members have voice chat, and actual rules are enforced, is always more fun that just playing with randoms. When you're on a teamspeak you've collectively set up and funded, on a server that you work on together, there's a greater sense of community, and there's less of the shitlordery. Additionally, the old CoD 4 servers weren't as bad as a random Modern Warfare 2 match, because the host's had rules, and they could ban people. It's the same with Counter Strike Source, or the old Day of Defeat community. These things aren't perfect, by any stretch (WAD was infamous in the Australian DoD scene for being terrible. Their main admin, an odious man named "Oldfart" would spend matches spitting and screaming obscenities into his microphone until someone said "****". Then it was a ban for the "c-bomb"), but they're a damn sight better than nothing, and at least give players some options for avoiding this shit, or dealing with it.
A big chunk of players don't talk at all, or only use text, or don't engage in middle school smack talk. They really shouldn't worry, no-one is complaining about them. What people are complaining about is the assholes who ruin it for everyone, and that goes especially for the people who aren't talking (Which is me in 99% of pubs). They spend their games ranting and raving, whether it's full on tirades at people over the game, or over trivial shit, or starting drama and fights, or just the standard slurs about homosexuals, minorities, women, and your mother (But she's horrible). Even if someone was mistaken and thought you were being a sexist asshole, and they wanted to take your comms away, you're not using them anyway. That's what makes it silent. If people are at least given the tools to deal with this shit, then they can have a fighting chance at dealing with it, but that doesn't happen because people don't think there's a problem. When the only option for dealing with these jerks is to troll them back, that's seriously weak effort on the part of the designer. The only option for most of the silent types who have a problem with this (Which I'd estimate is more than most, and apparently, so would the Escapist, suprisingly), is to make themselves a target as well, and that's rare. People don't go on there to listen to abuse, but they also don't go on there to have the abuse targetted at them specifically, so they don't usually bother.
Some of the improvements MOBAs have made in dealing with their (Often vile, like many competitive FPSes) communities are interesting. Tracking the behaviour of individuals, providing incentives for playing well, and suggestions like blocking microphone by default for players who are regularly muted, or their text, are interesting suggestions. But it won't change until someone important thinks there's a problem worth fixing.
