gladiusdei:
Sort of brings up a catch 22 then. Accept more than 6 players to give more a chance to play, but risk them quitting because its too big, or only give 6 a chance. Either way there are a lot of disappointed players.
I don't really view running games from the standpoint of giving more people a chance to play or trying to minimize the number of players who might be disappointed because their characters weren't accepted in the game. New games pop up all the time :)
A game needs to be fun for the GM as well and there is nothing fun (to me) about having to wade through a wall of posts during the initial excitement of a game...or, as the excitement wears off, waiting for all 8-10 players to log-in and post to give everyone a chance to contribute before moving the game along.
At any rate, I haven't had too many issues with player attrition on the GM side. I put a lot of thought into the recruitment stage of the game to try to minimize problems down the road and, after nearly a decade on RPoL, have a pretty good network of consistent players I leverage to help recruit other consistent players.