I have had my eye on this game for a while as I am currently in-between mmo's. I'm having a hard time stomaching the initial price as well as the monthly cost and noticed that they now have a buddy program in place where current subscribers can give 15 day invites to people.

If anyone is playing and has an extra invite, I would really like to give this game a try and if it is good, there is a good change I will turn the account into a full paid account which can net you a free month of game time.

I played it during a stress test they had, and while I am looking forward to seeing the finished product the early beta I was in was really rough. If you can get a free go, go for it, but unless they have made significant improvements over the last few months I wouldn't expect whole a lot.

That said, if it is much improved, let us know, I still have hope for it once it gets further along.

Here's a few notes I've recently seen since July 2015 regarding this game. They were comments on forums or on Youtube, so consider the source.

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• World geometry has broken welds.
• Combat animations don't play properly. Or at all. For PC's or NPC's.
• NPC Pathing is broken, pathing exploits abound. (especially in mountainous terrain)
• No emotes. (no animations, no text emotes)
• No friend list.
• No guild/settlement chat.
• Particle effects don't animate or display properly. (and are horrible, to boot!)
• Sounds are ... yeah, for 2 months sound distance was set to -1 so every cast was heard throughout the entire hex at 100% volume. Sound is terrible in general, breaks immersion, too quiet, too loud, inappropriate for attack type, etc.
• Combat has incredibly high latency, for such a simple game. I shudder to think what it will be like with any actual player load. There is a minimum of 250ms of latency for all attacks, regardless of your actual Internet latency.
• GPU load for such a simple game is insanely high. I've never seen a game with such terrible optimization.
• There is no water in the rivers. In the "River Kingdoms".
• Someone mentioned the world lit by a single bulb. Accurate, and cheesy.
• Recent combat changes completely changed the game (they changed EVERY FEAT), absolutely no chance of a respec, ever. Kiss that 7+ months of XP goodbye, you're useless now.
• Crowdforging is a facade joke. They have a plan, and they're developing to that plan, ONLY. What players want? They're not interested. What would expand the demographic? They're not interested. What would make actual money? They're not interested. The amount of ideas expressed on their forums could be used to make 3 high-pop self sustaining online games. All ignored.
• Horrible forum software. The worst I've ever seen. No moderation. Toxic behavior encouraged. The way the vets treat everyone, the devs included? Breaks every TOS/EULA ever on any moderated forum today.
• No details provided on how many developers are working on the game, ever. What's the number? 2? 3? They don't have money for even that many with so few subs, but they'll never tell, because it would crush the fragile community like the cracked egg it is.
• No interiors for buildings (except Inns)
• No underground areas for anything.
• No dungeons. No interior combat areas of any kind.
• No non-lethal combat. (no duels)
• PvP entirely pointless, ganking for the lolz, murder sim at it's finest, despite specifically stating during Kickstarter it would never be that.
• No logging. Very limited scrollback.
• Chat interface is an abomination. An intern on a weekend could do better.
• No ignore (not on the forums, not in-game)
• No mechanics to prevent stalking, harassment, bullying, griefing, etc. None. Zero. A serious problem, completely ignored.
• It's not Eve. It's not Eve with swords. It's not a reasonable hand drawn facsimile of Eve with swords. There is no comparison you can draw, in any objective manner, that this game is in any way like Eve save for one: ganking for the lolz. Hooray?
• New players can be killed by anyone, at any time, even in the starting areas. Ryan has said multiple times there is no safe zone in PFO, none. Their only guideline is: We would rather you didn't kill players in the starting village (a 10m circle), but we won't stop you. yeah, that'll keep the new subs rolling in.
• The entire concept of localized banks and auction houses is crushing the economy instead of encouraging it. As everyone who has played a game in the past that tried this knows, these concepts are the gushings of inexperienced armchair theorycrafters. Not proven industry professionals.
• They claim the game is not alpha or beta, yet make sweeping massive changes that you can only make in alpha or beta, and retain your customers. Yeah, guess what Ryan? Those customers you're abusing AND making them pay? They have limits.
• 8th grade math can demonstrate how many subs they'll need to keep the lights on. If daily activity is any indication, they're at a fraction of a percentage of what they need. This strongly indicates the game is a slowly rotting corpse, it's just not a skeleton yet. But they'll never say how many subs they actually have, because that would be the iceberg that sinks the ship for good.
• Finally, you know why people are paying the sub? Because they hope Ryan will be fired, the design document will finally be shown to the crowdforging zealots, and they'll be rewarded for enduring the Trial of Tears. IOW, the only reason people are paying is the glimmer of hope that $15/mo will pay off, either in resale of the account, or a complete overhaul of the game in the future.

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And more

• -There are no NPC's to buy or sell. Good luck selling anything above 1 copper in an insanely saturated market.
• -The auction houses are already being strip mined and stock
• -marketized.
• -You can be attacked anywhere, at any time, by anyone.
• -You cannot obtain wearable combat or crafting gear directly from monsters. At all, in any way.
• -The deterrent for killing players is effectively zero, once your character has reached the point where you're waiting weeks in between training, as all reputation consequences, no matter how bad, recover in less than a week.
• -There is no item repair.
• -There is no fast travel.
• -There are no mounts.
• -There are currently no plans to implement item repair, fast travel, or mounts, prior to 2016.
• -All gear lasts at most 20 deaths.
• -It takes days or weeks to create a full set of gear.
• -It takes days or weeks to gather the raw materials required for a single piece of gear.
• -It takes hours or days to refine the raw materials into components for final crafting.
• -You cannot craft everything by yourself, in practice. If anyone makes this claim, they're lying or misrepresenting the truth.
• -Crafting requires more XP investment than combat. You cannot be both on the same character and advance at a meaningful rate. Again, anyone that says otherwise is misrepresenting the truth.
• -There are no money sinks, and no, it's not crafting, because crafting times are so long, there's no loop there.
• -XP is only gained by the passage of time. How much you play has almost no impact on character power.
• -The veterans playing this game have been (and will always) accumulating XP since Jan 1, 2015.
• -As a result, you can never catch up, unless you buy a veteran account created on Jan 1, 2015.
• -Goblinworks current stance is "they will never sell XP". Sure. Just like Alganon, right?
• -The graphics engine is 10 years old, and it shows.
• -You cannot transfer items between characters, on a single account. Not that you would need to... because...
• -Only one character at a time can gain XP, per account.
• -As a result of the above, almost all veterans have multiple accounts. There is an anecdote of one veteran having 40 accounts to ensure their domination of the crafting market, given the "time is power" paradigm in play.
• -Banks are local for items, global for cash. This means you must carry everything from one place to another. Good luck with that.
• -It takes over an hour of non-stop running in one direction to cross the current map in a single line.
• -When you die, there is a 25% chance, per item, the item will disappear.
• -Anyone can loot anything off your corpse, with zero consequence to the looter.
• -Currently, PvE combat is a combination of leashing and kiting. There is no more strategies than that.
• -PvE combat is the only way to acquire money.
• -Crafting times (above) are so long, no-one wants to risk their gear. The economy, as a result, is completely utterly broken, despite the claim it was going to be the driver for everything in the game.
• -There have been dupe bugs for all items that have been permitted to remain. As a result, most veteran companies (guilds) have thousands of mats that would require years to accumulate otherwise.
• -No in-game mail.
• -No in-game guild (settlement) chat.
• -No friends list.
• -No logging. No combat log. You can't even see the damage you do unless you think watching quickly fading floaty numbers is acceptable in 2015.
• -No multi-group UI. No raid interface. No raids.
• -No dungeons. No caves. No underground areas of any kind. No towers. No interior exploration, combat, or similar environment of any kind.
• -Exactly one building type has an interior space. One. Everything else, no doors, no windows, no exterior/interior.
• -No 'other players map pins' visibility.
• -Harvesting uses spawned nodes, like it's 15 years ago or something. Yes, really. I know, but yes, they really really are. On the plus side, there aren't enough nodes, diminishing returns kicks in insanely quickly, and you can't even discern one node type from another, on the mini-map.
• -Respawn only works if players aren't in Line-of-Sight of the respawn location. (no, i'm not joking)
• -NPC's can't even walk up or down steep slopes, but the AI is so bad, they just stand tjadelehere, allowing uncountable exploits.
• -There is no mechanic that I have seen in this game that isn't in another game, done better. In other words, there is no aspect to PFO that makes it distinct, unique, innovative, or better than any other game. As such, it makes it extraordinarily difficult to attract and retain new players.
• -The developers, CEO, designers and programmers absolutely refuse, in any way, to consider making changes to attract a wider demographic. Their target audience is 4000 players. Yes, really. There's fewer than 100 unique players active per day, today, and the target launch date is January 2016. Pretty easy to see this is already a fail just taking a long time to die.
• -This is not a sandbox game. Sandbox games require sand, and there is no sand here. None. Zero. Community activity outside the game? That's not sand, but that's about all this game has going for it, at the moment. Everything in this game is on rails. People claiming you can choose? Sure, if you want to wait 5+ years (not exaggerating even slightly) for an effective character, or, guess what, you ride the rails and are effective within three months, at best. But don't tell anyone, because the vets get testy when you don't have to make the same mistakes they did.... yeah.
• -There is no meaningful feat customization beyond waiting days or weeks to improve to another rank.
• -Stat increases are purely gates to feat improvements, and require illogical and counter
• -intuitive investment of XP (time), again, further proving this is an on-rails no-sand game. Stats, in and of themselves, have no impact on combat or crafting.
• -PvP is ridiculously contrived, has no point, victimizes the losers, offers nothing to the victors in any meaningful way, and appears to be entirely 'ganking for the lolz' at the moment.
• -Pretty much every particle effect in the game is in some way illogical, broken or buggy. Placeholders after a year? Sure, that'll keep the customers rolling in.
• -No animation emotes.
• -No custom flavor text emotes. Emotes are a single yellow line of text.
• -PvP entirely favors attackers, and not defenders, in any non 1v1 situation. (as far as politics, world
• -pvp, RvR, outposts, settlements, etc.)
• -It takes no time to destroy "permanent" structures, and insanely long times and resources to build them. Destruction does not create resources for the victor. World War for the lolz, anyone?

I mean, it's been over five months since Ryan Dancey posted the following:
(and over seven months since launch / we-are-now-charging-a-monthly-sub-for-this)

from here: http://massivelyop.com/2015/03/30/pathfinder-online-opens-up-head-start-access-on-april-1st/

"

We are a live MMO, and we currently have a subscription model to finance operations and continued development of the game. There is a cost to buy the game ($35 as of April 1st), and a monthly subscription fee of $15. The first month's game time is included in the purchase of the game.

We are starting with a subscription fee because subscriptions are the least complex way for our players to pay for the game and the easiest system for us to implement. Later, when we're bigger and the game is more developed, we'll have other options, and eventually we will have a hybrid model like Turbine's Lord of the Rings game.

We have a cash store for additional purchases. Our commitment to our community is that nothing we sell in the cash store will be better than any item that the players can craft in-game with nothing but in-game resources, or will be simply aesthetic items and options that have no mechanical benefits. There are two items in the store now, the Base Camp and the Smallholding that are better than items that can be crafted, but that's just a function of timing - the in-game craftable structures that are mechanically equal to or better than those items are scheduled to be deployed in our next release in 3 weeks.

As noted by Elirion, we're not in an alpha or beta test. We're in a phase of development we call Early Enrollment. We've produced a fully playable MMO, but it's a "Minimum Viable Product". We have lots and lots of iteration to do to the game and many additional features to implement. Playing in Early Enrollment enables people to have fun in the game AND to provide feedback via a process we call Crowdforging that lets them shape fundamental game systems in a way that would be impossible later in the game's development.

Early Enrollment isn't for everyone, but for people who are interested in a fantasy sandbox MMO with a full player-crafted economy, territorial warfare, rich social structures and lots of innovative game play, combined with the Pathfinder world Golarion and one of the best communities I've ever been a part of, it's a really great time to be involved.

"

However, there are several core mechanics in direct opposition with each other, in this game, as of August 2015. In particular, there is a strong desire to create a game where player behavior isn't governed by rules or mechanics, yet this game is supposedly a "Minimum Viable Product" and they're charging money for it. Every game that has tried this (Mortal Online, Darkfall, Shadowbane, UO) has shrunk to hundreds of players so quickly, it merits recollection.

tl;dr? This is an unfinished game for which Goblinworks is charging $15 a month. Just let that sink in, and then decide with your wallet if you think paying a subscription for an unfinished game is a good idea for this genre.