I don't understand why you'd think requiring a phone number would fix any of this. The incentives are still against you. I still play games occasionally and I d

I don't understand why you'd think requiring a phone number would fix any of this. The incentives are still against you. I still play games occasionally and I deeply understand the frustration when the two hours you can afford to play in a week are utterly ruined intentionally by a thirteen year old child not getting his way. Your misjudgement is that the game company would eventually ban those accounts or at least only let you play against nice players after you've accumulated enough trust. Riot, for example, once said that they have all the data to only match the horrible, toxic people against each other and let everyone else have a great time, but they will never implement it in their system. All of those toxic players have a massive amount of value to them because of the money they spent, pooling them against each other would tank engagement and thus sales. So while you might be disincentived to play their game because of your past experiences, you're worth less to the company than the 10% ruining every other game for you. In my opinion valve fixed this problem a lot better with their counter strike lobby system. In that game, you can mark yourself "searching" like in other competitve games, but you have the option to not be thrown into a round directly but to have other players invite you to their team. You can then check their profiles and chat with them a bit to see what kind of people they are. Games that where ruined by my own team have become so rare that they can neglected when planning my evening, which has become the most important reason for me to start counter strike instead of other competitive games. There might be other options to improve the average match experience that I'm not aware of, but essentially outsourcing the player base moderation to the players in question seems like the best option I've encountered yet.