Hey all,
close to 50% of the people who join MAMEHub quit without playing a single game and never come back.
Although we can't ever know the exact breakdowns, I would venture to say that at least half of that 50% is quitting immediately because they do not see many users online and/or no active games running when they join.
In my estimation, there is nothing we can about the low average population except to continue to try building the community.
These people went to the trouble of installing MAMEHub, running the auto-updater, making an account, and logging in, so they have the right intentions.
I'm thinking that people get lost once they log in to the MAMEHub server. There's nothing telling them what to do, just this huge multi-panel frontend with no games to play.
I agree. Perhaps there could be a "first-run" prompt (similar to the first-run audit prompt) that informs users that they will need MAME [insert current version] ROMs in order to load MAME games.
Here's some things I'm thinking about to keep new users engaged:
- When someone joins for the first time, we make a GUI to guide them through adding their directories, auditing, and hosting a game
Technically, this should still be discernible from the MAMEHub Tutorial Video. Although the GUI has changed somewhat so the tutorial video should probably be re-done.
- We include one of the license-free MAME roms so that after the audit we can guarantee that the game shows up and no one has an empty game list. Also, after the person audits, we can say "double-click on (license-free game) to start playing!"
I can see that this change has already been implemented. I think it will be useful in the long-run for new users to have these public domain arcade games immediately available to them upon installation.
This is a topic I've wanted to discuss for a long time. I don't want to be a downer here
* but I have always thought that MAMEHub is an emulator that requires at least some experience with MAME (particularly command-line vanilla MAME).
The reality is, there is a vast set of issues that I have seen occur to users over the months. In many cases,
some kind of PC-Troubleshooting or simple file management skills are needed by the user to resolve their issues*. One look at the forum can provide a small sampling of the kinds of issues users have faced.
MAMEHub is a derivative of MAME and MESS. As such, MAMEHub requires MAME ROMs to be
exactly compliant with the version of MAME it is derived from. I would say a majority of MAMEHub users who join do not have ROMs that are current to the version of MAME within MAMEHub. They (understandably) tend to expect their old (and outdated) ROMs that "worked in other emulators"
* to also work in MAMEHub.
Many of the users with old & outdated MAME ROMs could recover at least some of what they need for MAMEHub by using
clrmamepro. However, once again, this requires experience that MAMEHub users rarely have (even among the "power users").
For ROM collectors who do keep their MAME ROMs up to date, they are mostly free of these issues
*. Everyone else however, will struggle somewhat because they don't know where to get the ROMs they need.
So far as I know, there is no public web site that offers all current MAME ROMs (and is guaranteed to be up-to-date). The options are limited for users without ROM collecting experience. In reality, newsgroups and quality torrent trackers (such as Pleasuredome,
not The Pirate Bay) are the best sources to obtain the correct MAME ROMs. This presents a problem for the average MAMEHub user who understandably just wants to point, click, go to their favourite games. Also, a lot of MAMEHub users are not interested in downloading a 25GB+ torrent just to have a handful of games. To be fair,
ROM sharing within MAMEHub has mitigated some of this problem but it's more of a stopgap measure. And most new users who just joined do not realize that ROM sharing is possible. Even if they do know ROM sharing is possible, there may not be anyone active at the moment they join to help them out by hosting the ROM they are looking for so they can share it.
Port forwarding issues aside, I believe it is the unfamiliarity with keeping MAME ROMs up to date that is the #1 cause for users to give up on MAMEHub. They probably try to use their old ROMs and when it doesn't work they assume the worst and cut their losses time-wise.
Sorry to ramble on for so long about this, I do have a conclusion though. My conclusion is that, at least in the short-term, MAMEHub should be billed as a platform for pre-existing MAME/MESS users who wish to leverage additional value out of their ROMs by using them in MAMEHub to play/test online with fellow enthusiasts. Although this would appear exclusionary, it would at least
set the correct expectation for new users.
It could also help if the
FAQ was updated and more visible to the users.
