From the Volvo Ocean Race Game website:

Sun 09 Nov 2008
We were tens of thousands rushing behind our computer screens today trying to take the best option over other competitors.
A veritable tornado hit our servers which went immediately into ‘Stealth’ mode.
More seriously, rest assured that to preserve the fairness of the game during this unfortunate blackout, the race has been put on ‘pause’. Racing will resume once the service has been restored online.
Our team apologies for this failure and we are doing everything in our power to ensure that the weather forecast become favorable as soon as possible
Thank you for your patience and fair wind to all!
Sebastien Destremau

Since around 4pm on Sunday the Volvo Ocean Race Game has come to a standstill. The servers on which they run the virtual sailing game have collapsed under the pressure. The smart-asses who developed the game are hosting another virtual sailing game, the Vendée Globe Virtual Race that started today from Les Sables d’Olonne, on the same servers.

The Vendée Globe Race is a round-the-world sailing regatta, without stopovers or assistance for monohulls.

That is more than 80,000 virtual sailors for 2 games with numerous variables that need updating every 10 minutes on 1 server. That is bound to go wrong, which happened today.

A lot of people are unhappy as they have been spending the last 24 days checking their positions on a very regular basis (that means a couple of times per day) and are getting very close to the finish of the first leg in Cape Town, now unable to make course adjustments or anything!

What I don’t really understand is how Volvo, a brand known for it’s safe and robust cars, can and wants to be associated with the developers of this virtual sailing game.

From the Volvo Ocean Race website: …Volvo‚Äö√Ñ√¥s three core values ‚Äö√Ñ√¨ Quality, Safety and Environmental Care…

Here we go, one of Volvo’s core values is Quality, yup with a capital Q.

Well after all the problems with the game, server downtime, non-communication, bad design, “Quality” is not a word that quickly comes to mind!

A big part of the website is designed in Flash, therefore hardly any SEO possibilities and much of the rest of the site is put together with – I hardly dare to say it – tables. Oh my!

Over the weeks lots of “stuff” has been added to the site, without any communication towards the virtual sailors; we’ll just have to check back and find out for ourselves.
There is a forum with help desk and many members use it to ask information on a wide range of topics, however none of those are answered.
On the news section you can read emails of other members, hardly news if you ask me. And the event page shows the schedule of the upcoming legs, without the actual starting times. Why not call it schedule then?

Anyways, through my Woopra stats I discovered that typing a number of keywords in Google turns up the following result:
[singlepic=123,320,240,,center]

That’s right, type the keywords ‘volvo ocean race game wind forecast change’ in Google.com and Piet Bos dot ME shows up first! [Nov. 8 update]Not anymore, it seems that someone has realized it and tweaked some here and there. Ah well, 2nd in the results now.

Well, that’s a feather in my arse! pulled it out again…

In my opinion the website of the Volvo Ocean Race Game should have been built on an entirely different platform, enabling much more interactivity with the now more than 50,000(!) virtual sailors.