It's actually the combined difficulty of all shares contributing to the block divided by the blocks network difficulty.

Effort represents the number of shares needed for finding a block.

We had to restart all pools for an important security update. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Going forward maybe. Are you telling me its correct that I lost 70K shares? 

You did not lose them rather somebody else moved so much ahead of you that the algorithm wouldn't consider them anymore. That's just how PPLNS works.

@Crypto Journey

That I was credited for 38.8K shares instead of 100K plus. You further check this as when I pulled my miners from the pool, I still had 40K shares remaining and received a payment of more or less the same for the very next block.

Actually that's exactly what supposed to happen when the PPLNS window boundary is reached. Your shares will be silently dropped from the calculation, but are eligible for inclusion in the next block which is exactly what happened with your 38k shares. Please take a look at Round 2 of the illustration in the FAQ.

At the moment the only plausible explanation for the variance in payouts appears to be the extreme volatility of the dash network difficulty over the past eight days. I queried the share database for the minimum and maximum network difficulty for submitted shares:

miningcore=# select min(networkdifficulty) from shares where poolid = 'dash1';
     min
-------------
 5.35662e+06
(1 row)

miningcore=# select max(networkdifficulty) from shares where poolid = 'dash1';
     max
-------------
 3.06027e+07
(1 row)

This appears to be in line with the graph at: https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/dash-difficulty-chart

Notice the extreme drop on 26th of October. We are talking about a 570% spread spectrum in network difficulty over 10 days here. Anyone with basic math skills will realize that such an extreme volatility will have a severe impact on share valuation: https://github.com/coinfoundry/miningcore/blob/master/src/MiningCore/Payments/PayoutSchemes/PayPerLastNShares.cs#L152. Notice how share difficulty is divided by network difficulty.

A problem in the payment processing module involving coins using the Lyra2RE2 algorithm such as Monacoin and Vertcoin has been identified. Since that problem cannot be fixed retroactively I'm crediting your account with 20 Monacoin.