from past experience, I believe the game is offline when I get this message; however, a new player will not have this past experience to rely on. this happens often enough that it should be handled more cleanly -- a static webpage notifying the user that the host is offline and to please check again in (insert reasonable time here).

incidentally, there were several new users on at the time this happened. (and I had just won the ec and was waiting for the 3rd place match to complete!)

What adress are you playing on?
When I had this problem and asked jed he provided me this one:
http://www.thefarwilds.com/flash/thinfl ... ?test=1234
works really well for me