There is some confusion about the different rates that our pools are paying, so I'll restate to hopefully clarify.
The Protected Pool - Pays out at 95% PPS. If you submit over 1.125M shares to the protected pool in one week, your rate is increased to 97% PPS. Only shares submitted to the protected pool count toward this threshold. (Redeem/PPS pool shares do not get this bonus).
The PPS Pool - Pays out at 95% PPS. Now that we've dropped the rate, this pool is inferior to Protected. If you have a large hashrate, you should move to protected. If you have less than 8GH/s, this pool is identical to protected, so do whatever is convenient for you.
The Redeem pool - Pays out at a flat rate of $0.00012427 as long as you have loyalty points. This is equivalent to $2.5 / GH/s / day. Redeeming one share costs one Loyalty Point. Your account's balance is held in USD, but we transfer the USD amount to you using BTC at the current exchange rate (see previous post on how we get this rate). We don't currently have plans to give out any more Loyalty Points, so if you didn't already earn any, you should just use the protected pool. If you have loyalty points, we already created an account for you on the redeem pool, so you don't need to sign up.
Here's the redeem pool announcement for anyone who missed it:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1350491 
