I wanted to give some quick updates on the PPLNS progress. PPLNS is up and running on https://alpha.masterpool.eu which is running on testnet. Feel free to register and play a bit, but keep in mind that it is still alpha  We have a neat new feature which I called round explorer. Due to the design of PPLNS you will sometime be awarded for shares that was committed in previous rounds or you may loose shares if the round is very long. In order to keep the calculations transparent I'll introduce the round explorer. Here is an example:

https://alpha.masterpool.eu/statistics/block/5ef6c40fab320bb1c08db96e924945d568ecc809241af8da8e32e114d3a2ad38

Both blockchains on MasterPool alpha use a difficulty modificator of 2 at the moment. This may change before the new version is rolled out to production. If a block is found (difficulty * 2) previous shares are used to calculate the reward. On the round explorer above you'll find your real submitted valid and total shares but also your amount of shares that were used in order to calculate the PPLNS reward (if it was a PPLNS round).

At the moment we have the funny situation, that NMC difficulty is twice as high as BTC difficulty on testnet, thus expect to get more NMC than BTC. This is not a bug but a feature 

Please feel free to come up with suggestions for improvement.