I'm thinking about buying the game however a couple of reviews and forum posts state their are problems with hiring pawns.

Please can someone answer the following questions;

1) Are there still problems with hiring pawns or receiving gifts after your pawn is hired?
2) What is required to hire pawns? Do you need GOG galaxy?
3) Can you only hire pawns from people you've added to your friend list on GOG Galaxy?

Thanks.

1) yes the rent system is still bugged gifts.rc,etc aren't getting through sadly (just tested his a coupe days ago)

2) not sure, but i think so and it may require cloud saves to be actve

3) friends pawns are free as are lower (and i think same ) leveled pawns than your arisen. other pawns will cost rc
based on the difference in level between your arisen and the pawn you want to hire

I had no trouble finding and hiring pawns. You DO need galaxy running, online play enabled in game, and I think cloud saves for that.

I did, however have all kinds of trouble getting any feedback from the game on giving/receiving gifts, comments, and rc from people hiring mine. I don't know if anyone actually hired my pawn because it never told me it was.

The feedback part of it seems broken, although I never tried it with a friend. I have read many people stating that they couldn't get their feedback to go through.

I like this game a lot but it killed my enthusiasm when I found this out, RC is hard to come by and the main source for it is sharing pawns. It's not a bad game without that, but it is a lot more entertaining with.

Some people say they had it work, but for all the people that have actually tested it with people they know on the other end of the exchange, say they had no luck, I can't say for sure either way. The "not working/bugged" people far out number the "working" ones.

Not sure if it is completely broken, or sporadic, or what. It's never given me feedback. I used galaxy while playing, and played online. YMMV.

If you don't mind the pawn problems, it's a great game.

I really wish we could get an affirmative official answer about it as well. I would love to change my review to 5 stars then.

TLDR:
1.Maybe. I have heard both yes and no from the web. It has been broken for me, it's never been properly addressed by anyone official either way.

2. You need Galaxy running and I am pretty sure you need Cloud saves enabled. You need to rest at an inn as well, to refresh the pawn list.

3. Friends pawns are free. You can hire any pawns from anyone that shares them, and the higher the level above your own, the more RC they cost. Which is why it hurts that it isn't working properly.

Edit: Format and typo fixes

As I said in another thread, I contacted GOG regarding this bug. This is their answer:

"Hello,

We are still investigating this issue.
The case was forwarded to the developer.
However, I cannot promise whether this problem is going to be fixed or not."

They are aware of the issue. Their email implies that it is not their fault and it's up to Capcom whether they decide to fix it or keep it like this.

It seems like the game sells quite well on GOG, that means a lot of people are going to be affected by this bug. Maybe if more people started complaining via emails (decently, please. no need to be rude), it'd put more pressure on them to fix it...

Profile of your pawn do not updated when someone hired and released him/her.
- your main pawn do not obtain knowledge of locations/quests/enemis when got rented.
You need teach your pawn by yourself. Not a big problem, as for me.

I'm pretty sure I've seen my pawn with "Unknown foe" knowledge early on. Too late to check now though, I've long since fought every sort of enemy in the game.

I've seen that without making her available for renting. My guess was that e.g. a wolf knowledge scroll gives a star for all wolf types.

The system is broken for me. When I go to "pawns your main pawns know" it says can not retrieve information. I never got any gifts or rc either. Apparently this was fixed on steam I really wonder why they cannot fix it here? Been playing for a while and it's really frustrating me.

I'm having no problems hiring pawns, I use the galaxy client and the cloud saves are turned on. But no ones hired my pawn so far.

I played with cloud saves off most of the time and didn't have problem finding player pawns to hire on lower levels. On higher level they are scarce, but enabling cloud saves didn't fix that. It's probably combination of "not many people are staying at level 183 at any given time", and dumb search system (can't filter for player-only, can't set level range you are interested in, can't search for specific skill you are looking for).

I never got any RC from someone else hiring my pawn, but I can't prove anyone even tried - I never tried it with a friend. But somehow I didn't feel shortage of RC anyway, even without using cheat engine.

To restate from other threads, I've tested with this various people and none of them got any rewards for me hiring and releasing their pawns, neither did I.