Does the balancing feature work properly? I have tried it a few times with only 2 pools, and every time like 80% of my hashrate was going to pool 1, and 20% to the other pool, sometimes flipping around. In the end the hashrate was absolutely not balanced.
Maybe it would be better to really start a separate instance of cgminer for each pool?
I have the exact same problem. All work goes to the first pool and the others see lots of discarded. From irc:
12:02:39 - t00tie: Does anyone know how to mitigate "Discarded work due to new blocks: 42"? I can't get load-balance to work properly on pools with different difficulty
12:03:01 - kke: load balance on different coins is going to do that always
12:03:41 - kke: cgminer thinks they're the same coin and discards work on all pools when one stratum (even a failover stratum which is disabled) announces a block change
12:05:13 - kke: that's why the test where the dude had 50/50 middlecoin/hashcows was kind of bad