I've found too many connection outages/issues with Eligius, a lower hash rate with my miner, no manual payout and a true lack of necessary graphs that the Guild has on your dashboard. I can't speak for the payout system at all, cause I'll never understand it. I've been happy paying the fee at the Guild and fortunately have had good luck there as well. Maybe a fee based pool motivates the pool operator a little more? I don't know, money usually does those things.
Yeah the payout system is somewhat complex....but it works for me

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Fees definitely enable having better equipment which can help combat ddos attacks, however I think the operator is very motivated. Resources are always limited, but with lower fees even more so. I'm happy with that trade-off...but thats a personal decision. If you're happy to pay the fee at guild, thas fine too. If you're a miner, there's no thing called luck imo, except when you're referring to incoming hardware shipments

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