On many games, the Mini and Minor changes and the Major doesn’t. Periodically we hear from players who wonder why:
I’ve been watching your videos for a while now and I’ve seen you play some machines that have a bigger Minor progressive jackpot than the Major progressive jackpot, like the high limit Dragon Link or Lightning Link games. Why doesn’t the Major change with each denomination like the Mini and Minor jackpots do?
Michael W.
Game design evolves over time, and when the Lightning Link series launched, it launched with two fixed progressives and two flat jackpots. The jackpots don’t really mean much – they’re just a multiple of your bet, and can replace a number on a ball of the same value – but are there to get players excited about “winning” a Mini or Minor jackpot.
By comparison, the two progressives were designed to increase in odds of being won as the bet increased, regardless of bet or denomination. But they remained the same amount across the board, whereas those psychological “jackpots” that were just fixed prizes would change, yielding the weird quick of the Minor sometimes being bigger than the Major.
It’s still important to check those progressives, as if you are going to win one, why not win the biggest one? And when we surveyed players on the BCSlots YouTube page, more than half of you check at least part of the time. You don’t need to check those Minis and Minors though, given how they’re set up.
The issue began when additional denominations were added – the original Lightning Link games, when introduced, were decidedly low denomination affairs. High limit versions mostly added a 0 to all the numbers but kept the basic structure intact. With Dragon Link, additional, higher denomination, options began to get added to the base game, and that higher range of denominations introduced the oddity.
On more recent iterations of some of the games, multiple Majors exist. This started with Dollar Storm, where the high limit denominations had a different Major progressive than the lower denominations, and the handling of these prizes have continued to evolve on more recent versions.
The original Ultimate Fire Link had different progressives on each bet level (and all four were progressives), only to evolve their handling of it on newer games to do the flat jackpots as well. Lock it Link doesn’t tend to have enough denominations to generally see this happen, just as the original Lightning Link.
So it ultimately comes down to how the game series evolved, first introducing the quirk, and then finding various ways to resolve it.
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