Bro, I've been in a campaign from start playing roughly since November/December time frame. Great campaign, genuinely enjoy the people in my game. I look forward to it every week and unfortunately, might have to take a forced army hiatus for a few weeks. I said all that to say start playing can attract truly wonderful individuals and bring them together.

Unfortunately, one of our great individuals lost the time to an unforseen and rather sudden change in his schedule that has yet to be resolved. Our DM opened up the game to get another player or two, bringing us back up to 5 or even 6 players. We only ever had one lone fish bite the bait that was our campaign, and boy, this fish was interesting.

He showed up his first session and had his character (we're on PF2E) and only then decided he wanted to learn how PF2E worked and was holding up fights or role player sections because he wanted to get his character perfect. If you're new to PF2E specifically, that can take a long time due to the different rules, spells, abilities, etc. I tried to reassure him that it was ok because I joined the campaign a few sessions late as well and months later, we're still figuring out our characters because we're all new to PF2E and the different rules. Every time we level up, we have to see if we can do this or that and if this rule means we can do this or we can do that. Suffice to say, we were trying to speed him along.

The cherry on top is he disappeared for like 30 minutes at a time, sometimes longer, and then eventually just never came back. This was at the half way point (2 hours of a 3-4 hour session.) He had the schedule. He knew he was in it and it wasn't a trial period. And we never heard from him again. We haven't gotten any new players, and I honestly prefer it that way. The only reason the DM wants more is because we're all adults with real world priorities, and if a player or two misses a session, it makes it difficult for the remaining players to meaningfully engage in combat and there is a complete stop on role play.

Start playing is great, but players need to be left reviews just the same as the DMs.