The difficulty increase of 18.1% seems to have changed everything. We were going along pretty good until then. Is the only way to overcome that just adding hashing power? Would it take an 18.1% increase in miner hash to have stayed at the near 100% luck point?
edit: That would have been a 4.88PH/s increase needed just to stay current
It just moves the length of time it takes to submit enough shares to reach 100%. But since the pool hashrate jumped from ~21Ph/s to ~28Ph/s, we actually were ahead of the 18% diff increase and shortened the 5nd by a couple of days.