Multiplayer games are so hard to get to work in LD where players arrive sporadically :(

I had a similar silence for attempt a few LDs back:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/08/30/cage-flight-autops...

Hey I remember that game. I was able to get a dozen or so people to log in at the same time towards the end of the competition, but I don't expect more of that during voting. (Also I can't seem to keep the server up)

Where did you host it?

Heroku forces you to use long polling instead of websockets, and long polling is not very good for keeping it speedy.

It's on a free tier amazon ec2. I'm actually amazed at how fast websockets are, I can get a good connection even on my smartphone.