Pathfinder Online is currently in “early enrollment” (read: alpha/beta) while charging a subscription, a combination that doesn’t exactly see customers falling over each other to sign up. Regardless, Goblinworks CEO Ryan Dancey took to the forums to express his disappointment in player recruitment being “almost zero.” He suggests that players head to other websites including Reddit, news websites, and the Eve community to openly discuss their activities.
Settlements that are committed to growing should have someone delegated to be visible in these places making regular posts and talking about the cool stuff their Settlement is doing. When the wider community sees activity and fun, that is a powerful attractant.
Dancey’s comments have been criticized by community members, pointing to the game’s early access state coupled with the subscription putting players off.
Ryan, I strongly feel that mass recruiting efforts now are premature. The kind of people we’d be able to pick up from the mainstream sites are people who will login for a week, see a game which is very immature, draw incorrect conclusions, and never come back. The longterm success of the game will be much better if we wait to recruit those people until we have a chance to actually keep them.
I think the real failure was in the original business planning by the people in charge. Seems like what they suspected was a MVP that the target audience would pay money for was grossly miscalculated. Maybe this would have worked 10 years ago.
I will not go and try to make the game look like a million, using sugar-coated words and focusing on telling the positive stories, while completely ignoring or downplaying the negative parts in front of other gamers. So I’m doing the best I can for GW, and that is, being silent.
(Source: Pathfinder)
MMO Fallout 
