This is the same for every pool and for Bitcoin as a whole - there are always people who are not happy with this or that, but and they don't want to understand 'how it works', but then why are you in bitcoin and what do you expect from it i'll ask ?!

The latest 'technical problem' with bitcoin is also a great example - it 'dropped the trust' and it's price because ... someone wrote so ... and no one wants to 'compute' what it means. In the last week i have explained to more than a dozen of friends that instead of depending on the txid one could simply check the receiving address transactions and the one from it's own address for the same value and at the same time to confirm it - it is just an ease to have it, but you don't need it.

J_DubbsSomeone writes that 'pool problems' are causing 'the bad luck', then because no one wants to 'come here for additional formulas to compute' and accepts that as 'the sacred truth' moves away ...
=
Someone writes that there is a bug in bitcoin 'causing problems' ... are the problems real or imaginary no one wants to understand before 'jumping ship'

My suggestion to those who don't want to 'compute' - get some one who want and can, someone you trust, ask him before you act ... but better still try to understand it yourself

The problem with folk leaving and joining other pools is that Slush then becomes "the other side" which we know is always greener. oh dilema dilema..
There would be the sound of tiny brain cells exploding all over the world... Which to be fair would be slightly less annoying than the constant moaning.

Just to define
A Hobby is a pastime in which you sink your money and spare time for the enjoyment.
An investment is a risk that the investor has weighed up and is happy to take in order to grow the original money.
Easy money - well that is just left of the leprechaun at the end of the rainbow, sitting in the fountain of youth, sipping the elixir of life from the holy grail...

...................................................

Your statement is, on the face of it, pretty reasonable, and when I first started mining I often wondered the same thing.

That's why knowing the exact probability distribution to which shares (edit: submitted shares/ expected shares) belong is so important - you can easily find out exactly how probable a certain group of results should be, and it's how I discovered Bitclockers were not paying their miners appropriately and reporting fallacious data.

A few pages back I provided a method to do exactly that, without any need for formulae (yay!). Why don't you check the results yourself? There might actually be a problem, and if you can prove it you'll save a lot of people (including yourself) a lot of heartbreak. If not, you'll be much more comfortable dealing with variance since you can prove to yourself it's within acceptable limits.

I am a newbie here, and to mining (man I wish I would have started a long time ago). That being said, I have done a lot of reading and research on the subject.

So first, I agree that people need to quit whining, especially when they don't understand the math and statistics involved. But second, if there ARE technical issues, it would be beneficial to be transparent about it. If there are NOT technical issues, then, when things appear to not be going well, an occasional post to confirm that everything is working fine on the back-end and the pool is indeed experiencing bad "luck" would at least show that the owner of the pool is taking care of things.

As for me, I understand what I got into, and Slush has had a good reputation for quite some time.

But in the end, there will always be whiners...

Ok, since everyone is looking for something to blame, here is something to think about. The Pool's adjusted difficulty seems to be adjusted in steps. A certain hashrate range gets a certain difficulty. Cross the border by even one hash and you get then next difficulty. Does a hashrate at the low end of the range for a given difficulty receive fewer shares than the hashrate at the high end of the range because it has fewer finds to submit? An example, becuase i think i stated this awkwardly.

I have a miner that shows 36 Gh/s on CGminer and shows about 31 - 33 Gh/s on the Pool. This is about a 10% difference which i think is acceptable. But, all my other miners which are in the 10 - 12 Gh/s range show exactly the expected hashrate.

I'm thinking that perhaps if my 36 Gh/s miner were on the high side of the range for it's difficulty, it's hashrate would be more accurate.

If this: http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/chart.php is to be believed then I think if you knew the hash power at GHash.IO which has 31.3% and  Slush's which is 3.5% you could easily see if the "luck" is across the board. Does GHash.IO have roughly 10x the Ghash/s as we have here?

Where did you bail too that had this wondrous fortune that you speak of?  

something just reset on the pool.  estimated payout just went to 1/4 of what is usual. .  its slowly recovering again so won't be an issue if the round doesn't end in the next 5-10 minutes. .   but something does appear to be up with stability as this happened a couple days ago as well. . generally not an issue unless the round ends when all the numbers are off. . .

And yes, I imagine if you were in another pool the last few days, you probably would have made 3x more than here because the pool luck has really hammered that this week. .   I'm off about 60% over previous expected results mainly due to these long blocks. .

Whats also crazy is that I think the pool looks to be down about 710Th - thats almost 200TH loss in the last few days. . .so payouts are probably edging up, but times are going to be longer. . that still doesn't offset the run of bad luck this week though.

if you are only getting 7 or 8 MH there is something really wrong. you should getting GH

I'm using 3 Antminers since today. (They give me about 1.9 Gh each, not overclocked yet- will do in a couple of days) And I'm using a 60 Gh ButterflyLab miner. (That's flat out !)
Beware to use thew right driver before you start mining. To get all my devices running like they should cost me a lot of blood sweat and tears. Try Youtube for some info. I am running all my miners on BFGMiner now. Saving money to buy about 300 Gh extra mining power in the next couple of months. Slush is my first and favorite mining pool !