On startup or while it was running? If it's "only" a VRAM ripple capacitor that blew, then you might be able to still run the card fine :]

On topic - Payout looks to be good today (or at least in-line with current exchange rates), however, my rejects have been up quite a bit in the past 12 hours or so...

I don't see too many others around me with similar issues, so most likely it's a latency thing

Edit: and now they're trending back down... guess the issue resolved iteself

That just does not seem fair or right. Hardware should be irrelevant once the server accepts my work and tells me I have XX.XXX hashrate. The server is accepting (as verified in stats) 3.6mhash or more of my work an I get paid for less than peers that do the same work.  

I decided to split my rigs apart with one on a different address shortly after payout time.  The main rig (2.2mhash) is sitting at .013/.020 BTC overnight, the other rig (1.4mhash) got .0047/.0025

https://i.imgur.com/7w1StXs.png

Since last night, and all during the night, my rigs have all been stalling out every 20 minutes like clockwork. That is, everything is working fine, hashing away, but suddenly no shares will be accepted after ~20 minutes or so of normal function. Cgwatcher eventually reboots cgminer, even though cgminer didn't freeze and is to all appearances still hashing away. Config hasn't changed on my end and was previously working great.

So I conclude it's gotta be server issues. I end up with a ~12% loss of hashrate because of this.

Um, the two aren't related... correlation doesn't imply causation.

My balance today is already higher than what I got paid out yesterday  

Thanks... but he was only a small percentage of the pool, so unless more leave, one guy, regardless of size, does not change this.

*snicker*

That makes absolutely no sense. So, you are to tell me, if one person doubled the hash rate of the group tomorrow that would not cause damage to the smaller miners? What matters is the total available opportunity for arbitrage - costs associates divided by hashes per second. If someone adds 10% or 20%, that lowers profitability for everyone in the pool. In this case, it even lowered the profitability for that miner over mining litecoin because his rig is simply too large to realize the benefits of the small margin that smaller miners benefit from. If he has an extra 1000 mhash to the pool and then leaves and the pool makes the same amount - that's more divided among less miners.

You must like to be sold a slice of pizza that is 1/16 of a 18" pie and not 1/8 of that same pie.

this is correct if you are talking pool vs. pool. middlecoin is operating as a single entity vs. all of the other groups of miners.  since mining is competitive, having larger miners in the pool gives us a better chance of finding blocks than a smaller pool.

within the pool, we get paid out a percentage of the pie.  the pie gets bigger when we add more mining power.