>>732437
I made a Steam group for a previous project of mine that also involved multiplayer, way back when /vr/ was still new.
During the course of a week spent advertising for people to join the group, Mediafire reported that at least 71 people downloaded the compilation I made available that included both emulator and ROMs. Out of those 71 people, only 12 joined the group. Of the 12 that joined, none of them participated or did anything. At all.
I had also proposed to use Comodo VPN, a free alternative to Hamachi, which included unlimited global chat right off the bat and alot more slots (and was going to be necessary anyways because the emulator only supported LAN netplay). Roughly the same ammount of people who joined the Steam group joined the network. And just as they did before, none participated.
And those who didn't were either bitching because they didn't have Steam and they weren't about to join because they weren't interested in any of the games they had to offer, or wearing tinfoil hats because they feared about getting hacked by joining a VPN.
Some other anon kindly set up a TeamSpeak server for people to talk on and actually use during netplay. Nobody ever showed up.
The last thing I did to setup an external meeting place was an IRC chat, where at least one other person joined. But alas, my internet went out briefly while I was AFK, and when I came back, the room was just as empty as it was before.
The only solution that I've found to be quite effective would be a /vr/ Kaillera server. It doesn't require people opening ports on their router (despite how horribly easy it is to do so), while offering basic chat and matchmaking service.
This anon here >>731127 made one for us. But it appears to be a European server, which is awesome for all our eurobros, but doesn't cut it for people in America, since the server handles all traffic. I would insist it stayed up for them.
We still need an american Kaillera server, though.