Someone is adding a lot of hash power to the network right now and the average block time is around 20 seconds.
20 seconds is insane and it will result in a lot of orphans... fortunately for you that is my problem because I pay-per-hash.
20 seconds also means a lot of stales... new block shows up before your share does. This is your problem because I don't count these. At 20 second intervals, a 1 second ping time means 5% stale automatically.
This is all just another form of seeing the difficulty increase. It is still a lottery system
