BTCGuild teams have no utility. They're purely for fun. (unless something's changed in the past few months)
ETA: To join a team, go here: https://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=account (in the first box of options)
ETA: To join a team, go here: https://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=account (in the first box of options)
Exactly, the team feature simply allows you to compare your hashrate with your friends.
Teams are a "for fun" feature, something people requested long ago. People used to form teams for things like Folding@Home and Seti@home so they could compete as groups / communities. They offer no benefit, they're just something to view individual rankings for a team, or compete as a group against another team.
As for satoshis trickling in while your miners are offline, PPLNS is a time-delayed payment method. This means you start out with low rewards (since you only have shares in a few shifts), and eventually those rewards grow as you have shares in more shifts (up to 10). When you turn off, you still have shares in shifts and rewards continue to trickle in until all of those shares have expired. This is sometimes confused for having poor rewards for part-time miners, but that is not the case. The expected value of a share is the same whether you have shares in previous shifts or not. A single share makes its way through the shifts and gets paid blocks. The existence of your other shares does not have any effect on what payments that share will receive by the time it matures.
As for satoshis trickling in while your miners are offline, PPLNS is a time-delayed payment method. This means you start out with low rewards (since you only have shares in a few shifts), and eventually those rewards grow as you have shares in more shifts (up to 10). When you turn off, you still have shares in shifts and rewards continue to trickle in until all of those shares have expired. This is sometimes confused for having poor rewards for part-time miners, but that is not the case. The expected value of a share is the same whether you have shares in previous shifts or not. A single share makes its way through the shifts and gets paid blocks. The existence of your other shares does not have any effect on what payments that share will receive by the time it matures.
