I think the reasons are 1. That would take some effort, 2. Math fail (such as the below-mentioned pool op not believing that pool hoppers reduce earnings, and me being unable to communicate with him in the language of integral calculus and binomial statistics, since he's working at a hosting company at the age I was studying engineering), 3. User resistance (typical PPLNS conversion discussion: "I don't like the idea of my shares expiring..."), and 4. Greed - hopping doesn't reduce the earnings of pool ops, just the users, and more block solves = more fees they get to keep.
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I am referring to the instability and extra work that hoppers create for pool operators and their users. I happen to know several network problems at bitcoins.lc were from pool hoppers, specifically from hundreds of connections a second being opened by the multipool op and other unknown actors, essentially DDOSing the pool. Jine had to implement firewall caching because of the load the constant stat-refreshing was causing, and had to switch over to to a VM environment with load distribution between six different servers, because proxied and aggregated connections were not re-using TCP sessions properly and would run pushpoold out of TCP/IP ports and crash the pool for all the users. That I might be bitter about, along with having to switch my higher aggression mining tasks to a PPLNS pool instead of my first choice, to avoid earning measurably less.
I do somewhat agree that the game is flawed if you have to kick out the card counters. However, you aren't taking from the house, you are taking from other miners in a situation where the ideal would be that we pool our resources for the good of all. My response is to the self-justifying posts every few pages of this thread that "pools should be glad, we help them solve blocks", or "xxx pool is unscrupulous a-holes because they are taking measures against pool hopping".
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I am referring to the instability and extra work that hoppers create for pool operators and their users. I happen to know several network problems at bitcoins.lc were from pool hoppers, specifically from hundreds of connections a second being opened by the multipool op and other unknown actors, essentially DDOSing the pool. Jine had to implement firewall caching because of the load the constant stat-refreshing was causing, and had to switch over to to a VM environment with load distribution between six different servers, because proxied and aggregated connections were not re-using TCP sessions properly and would run pushpoold out of TCP/IP ports and crash the pool for all the users. That I might be bitter about, along with having to switch my higher aggression mining tasks to a PPLNS pool instead of my first choice, to avoid earning measurably less.
I do somewhat agree that the game is flawed if you have to kick out the card counters. However, you aren't taking from the house, you are taking from other miners in a situation where the ideal would be that we pool our resources for the good of all. My response is to the self-justifying posts every few pages of this thread that "pools should be glad, we help them solve blocks", or "xxx pool is unscrupulous a-holes because they are taking measures against pool hopping".
Yes, all of the aboove are viable reasons. But that's the real world, if someone is lazy or ignorant, then they ususally get less paid job than someone smart. It is true, that on a pool with hoppers, miners will receive less money. Actually the more correct, would be that on the pool with hoppers, miners receive the exact money they are supposed to receive on a Prop pool. Without hoppers they just receive more bonuses from the short blocks. Blaming hoppers for this is like blaming poker players that they only play good hands and fold on bad hands. Or blaming some people that they only buy lottery coupons when there is a cumulation and the EV from such buy is above 0 and as such reducing the reward for everyday-lottery-players. Hoppers so use the system for their benefits. The first people who started using GPU instead of CPU for mining were also using the system for their benefits, where they suddenly found an "unfair" advantage.
Network stability is related to the implementation of hopping rather than hopping itself. Hopefully BH will improve and be more efficient with retrieving data. But still, our first choice is JSON, which should be cheap for the pool server. If a pool fakes JSON then we download their website
Mining is a game of chance and game of skill. To mine effectively, you need to use the best software and best hardware, otherwise the results are going to be sub-optimal. Every new GPU added to the network causes all other miners to loose their income. Every new version of mining software kernels also give more money to miners using it on the expense of miners who don't. Mining bitcoins is all about taking it from other miners.