paid hours later much less than they should have.
Based on what? The pool exchanges the earnings on an exchange. Volatile coins will go up/down in value.
You're a newbie, so you're excused... But yeah that's what happens. You mine, and in the end you get the value of what the mined coins are being sold for.
If that is something that you don't like, you should move to a pool that only mines the coin that you want. You mine coin X on algo Y, get paid in coin X.
Do you understand a bit?
so for example, the summary shows I mined say .2725% of that coin, obviously that will move down as I stop mining that algorithm. Lets say its .1555% or something by the time they find a block. I'd expect to get paid .1555% and I was paid way way less than that.
