Just a curious thing I have noticed recently:
The payouts appear to be lower than they used to be (1/5 - 1/4 less than before). Is it cause people are randomly throwing hash power to the pool? I thought PPLNS doesn't really reward short bursts of hashpower?
I have been giving consistent hashrate for a month+ now and I don't see an increase in Invalid hash percent (0.149%)? And the pool rate average does not appear to any more than before.
If I did a strait conversion from my last 7 days block conversion of (0.057%) I should roughly see 0.01425 BTC (0.057% x 25BTC) per block, which is consistent to previous payouts if you consider the average before was 0.0139 BTC. Yet the last three payouts received averaged 0.0113 BTC. It only is about a 20% difference so I'm not extremely worried, I'm just curious about how it all works!

Please help me learn more about cryptocurrency and mining!