Jine,

Do you have the statistics available (and the time of course) to generate some comparisons of payout methods using real historical data from the pool?  Per user would be great (I'd like to see if I would have made more or less with my miners since joining the pool) but a lot of work I'm sure.  Even some "this is a typical full-time miner of X mh/s, this is a typical part-time non-hopper user, and this is a typical hopper" over the last 365 days would be very helpful.  If you could also show what payouts would have been without the hoppers in the pool for everyone else that would be even better.  My suspicion is without factoring out the hoppers being in the pool, merely adjusting their payouts to the tested method along with everyone else, the amount of payout I'd have received would be roughly the same.  If you can in fact "remove" them from the pool for the statistics, I'd be curious to see if they really do hit regular users for up to 20% as is being claimed, or if the reduction in found blocks due to loss of hash power will offset some or all of that loss.

At the end of the day, I don't care if I make (obviously exaggerated) 20% of 50 BTC found or 10% of 100 BTC found in the same period of time, the payout to me is the same, 10 BTC, for the same amount of work I contributed.  I don't care about hoppers unless they're reducing that number either by taking an unfair portion, or if they're causing undue delay or downtime on the pool.  It sounds like that is happening, but as they say, "the proof is in the pudding."

Thanks Jim!

Jeremy