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Many of you may have noticed some changes lately, some downtime, and some updates, and I figured it was time we explain what all has been happening in HG, what it means for you all, and where we go from here. First, you've probably noticed the new fourms, we upgraded our forums to Invision Community 4.6 from 4.4, which was last updated around 2019. This brought some challenges in finding updated and working plugins, theme changes, and other look, feel, and management changes. We hope you enjoy the new layout and thank you for your patience while we work out all the other minor kinks around this. Second, we have been doing major back-end consolidation and overhaul of our servers. HG leases 4 physical servers, collocates 2 HG-owned servers, and leases a handful of various VPSs. Part of our forum update was moving to a new web host - we consolidated all our web servers into 1 collocated HG-owned (donated) dual-processor server. This gives us a ton more flexibility in what we're able to do, reduces our costs in infrastructure, and allows for potential future growth. Additionally, we've been working to consolidate game servers. We've worked to move CSGO Jailbreak to our Ryzen server, as well as working to move our "active" live servers to Ryzen and winding down our less active servers so we can concentrate on making a couple really high quality servers in each division. In the future, this will mean us retiring one OVH server, and since CSGO Jailbreak was on a Chicago server by itself, we have now been able to cancel that server as well. This will bring our physical servers down to 1 leased, and 2 HG-owned, with no VPSs. Lastly, we need to talk about Anycast - that word that many of you have heard, but may not understand or know how it affects you. We have previously partnered with GFL to add a number of our servers to Anycast, and have seen huge success with that project. While this may be a little controversial, we think that it is best for HG, our players, and the servers we manage to invest more in this and concentrate our live servers on our Anycast network. For those who aren't completely aware, Anycast is kind of a spoke and hub - we have a number of smaller servers around the world that act as responders for our main server. These smaller servers cache the reply from the hub server to send to clients when they are looking for a game. The side effect of this is that when a player is searching for a new server, our servers pop up quickly at the top of their list, because those near-by servers reply much faster than a server across the planet. This often has the side effect of users thinking our server has lower ping for them, but in reality they might be connecting from Australia to the US. While this isn't entirely ideal, we have seen the results, and taken notice of other communities doing this, while we need to compete with them to keep up and keep our servers from being empty at the bottom of the server search. With that understood, we plan to move from GFL's Anycast to our own that we own and manage, which will allow for things like implementing our own customer DDoS solution, as many DDoS solutions utilize Anycast as well. We have been working to raise funds to start this, as well as reviewing our infrastructure and number of servers to narrow down which would benefit most from being moved to Anycast. Here's some light Anycast reading: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/glossary/anycast-network/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anycast https://www.keycdn.com/support/anycast https://gflclan.com/forums/topic/36839-what-is-gfls-network/ Overall, we think these changes should improve your experience in using our platforms and servers, while keeping our costs down and continuing to bring in fresh players to our servers. As always, I'm happy to hear any questions, concerns, or feedback you might have about any of this.

Ashe's Recruit Application Game Division Counter-Strike Global Offensive In-Game Name In-Game Name Location Florida How old are you? 16 Which games (servers) do you play on? JB How long have you been playing on our servers? 11 months What is your Steam ID? (This is NOT your Steam name!) STEAM_0:1:540445457 Why do you want to join HG? I was in HG for around 10 months and i want to rejoin in the community All members are required to be on our TeamSpeak3 Server whenever playing on our servers. Will you agree with this rule? Yes Do you have any current VAC bans? No Who (if anyone) referred you to apply? Any other information you want to include? We back baby

anycast just makes people find the server. if the server wasn't fun, people wouldnt play on it. the tf2 anycast server has been dead since day 1, and even some of the csgo servers have been getting lower population (granted this could be because summer is almost over lol). obviously anycast makes a huge difference, but hg should be more focused on improving the actual server rather than using methods to fake ping. it just gives hg a bad name in general I am positive a lot of players/leadership are not aware that anycast fakes ping. i remember thinking the low ping was an issue when anycast was used in tf2, and now i am kind of disappointed that it was intended. just because other communities fake ping doesn't make it justifiable. facepunch has taken down/blacklisted servers before for ping spoofing... even if valve and facepunch don't pay attention to community servers much anymore, hg still shouldn't be doing this

i think rust was successful because of how well the rust division managed and moderated the server. the rust division probably wouldve done just fine, with or without anycast

hg shouldnt be using anycast if it fakes ping to get higher on the server browser. idk much about anycast but it sounds a bit scummy imo

Thanks for informing us imason. Appreciate the transparency regarding this

thanks for letting us know what's been going on recently can't wait for the future of hg

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I like reading these very much! Thanks for making another newsletter Lucas! Also I see my name on there

Happy Birthday Fweakz!