As it says on the tin. By making referral Companions soulbound, every single active player is being asked to either:

1. Recruit multiple people
2. Be okay with missing out on Companions if they are not comfortable doing so

My suggestions:

1. Make them not soulbound and allow more than 1 per account. Those who are not comfortable being a regular recruiter could purchase them from other players who are.
2. Make them available through recruiting AND another method

support - just posted on the update thread as well, but would really very much like either of these suggestions. I'm fine with them being unique and soul-bound if they are available through another method

Support. I have anxiety. While I realize the devs do not have malicious intent, it still feels like I am being punished for it by expecting me to recruit active players out of a pool of strangers due to the fact that my friends have either already joined or will not join.

Support: I'm incredibly socially awkward irl and feel incredibly uncomfortable asking strangers online to sign up for a website. I have no platform on any other site to advertise, and have already recommended the site to all the people I talk to regularly (the ones that the site interested already signed up as well, making the situation even worse). These companions are ADORABLE yet completely unaccessable for anyone with social anxieties.

Support. I've tried being ultra aggressive with recruiting before on all my social medias; Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, etc. and I literally never got maybe more than 1 strangers on the site. It's just kind of unrealistic to expect every player (if everyone on site was a completionist) to manage to get multiple people to join a pet site AND grind to a certain level.

i disagree with adding another method to obtain the companions but i for sure think the devs need to give every user at least one referral bonus cause thats how literally every user has an account rn. all me and my friends already have accounts and theres no way im gonna convince my nonpet sim friends to play lorwolf so i can get a Pomeranian png

support!

Support to all of those. The companions shouldn't be soulbound, those who can, should be allowed to get more than one, and there should be alternates ways to get them. Companions are an integral part of the game, and making a set of companions that tied to recruiting, when not everyone ha the social reach feels awful.

My ideas are this: Maybe you get tokens from doing stuff that involves friends (referring people, adding friends), and maybe any social activity? (forums, messaging, arena, selling/buying on Flea Market, anything that gets you interacting with others) These would be given at certain milestones (every ten forum posts, every ten messages, something like that), and would create a way that'd be easy for almost anyone to obtain.

Additionally, as we move forward, I think they could add things into the professions similar to how Flight Rising lets you share notes with friends in their Archaeology profession. So basically like, you could have friends help water/fertilize your plants, or dig faster when Archaeology is out, speed up cooking, send a wolf/companion to help with all someone's hunts (increases chances by level, maybe), or other things like that. It'd give you more ways to interact with your friends, and would reward Friend Tokens! (For both members.) All of these by just naturally playing the site. You could do it with anyone registered to your friends list. It would also give us a fun way to help out newbies, which would encourage them to stay. (Yay, friends!)

The important thing is to never lock content like this behind forcing people to have friends. Hence why I suggested any activity that interacts with the greater community. All of these activities should be optional boons for getting friend help, never a requirement. I see so many people on Flight Rising in particular who have maybe one or two people on their friends list (if that!), and they never post to the forums, but often still use the Auction House. I want to include those sorts of people in this, too.

I'm sure there's still room to workshop all this, but here's my ideas so far. The unfortunate thing about the current system is that there will never be enough new people to invite to keep it sustainable. Flight Rising has been around ten years, and still doesn't have more than a few thousand active players on the site at any given time (except during big events/announcements), and that's with thousands of accounts. I've also seen tons of mobile games try the Refer A Friend nonsense, or Exclusive to Friend Help stuff, and it's really hard to achieve, even with a built-in friend finder. So it just... I don't think this is a good direction. At all. Maybe with some tweaks. I hope staff will tweak it.

-----
Edit: Also adding more methods to get them and the currency for buying them lets staff add in more Friend Token items in the future without upsetting people. Imagine if we could get friendship sweaters or something!

Also consider: Gift boxes where you get a Friend Token for giving them, and the only thing you can do is give them to a friend, and then the friend can open them. Maybe you get one a day, or one a week, or I don't know. Randomly in Arena/Campaign/Gauntlet? Can craft them? Maybe craft them with one friend token and some materials? Buy them with friend tokens? I don't know???

Edit 2: Also these things would give different amounts of tokens, these aren't equal. Also friendship tokens could be sellable.

Support.

All of my friends who would like this game and would play it long enough to gain the companions are already playing the game. Locking out what seems to be a good majority of your player base is not going to go well. This may be especially true for those of us who are older and don't have as much contact with people who might be interested. Having these items being soulbound on top of that is even worse in my opinion, it's like punishing those who have anxiety or other social issues who can't or don't want to reach out to strangers and badger them until they hit the cutoff for the pets. Having another way to access these companions allows for multiple, valid ways of playing (being it buying/trading/earning/etc) those companions. Orgetzu brings up a couple of nice ways to work around a referral aspect as well. I understand wanting to be a big game and having a lot of players, but this is not the way to go about it.

Kinda like the idea of the friendship tokens for doing active stuff around the site.