Observant players love to ask us about this one, and a recent Brian Christopher video brought the question back around recently. Here’s the short:
The question refers to the Major progressive vs. the Minor:
I never understood why a Major on Dragon Link is smaller then a Minor when clearly Major’s meaning would be higher then a Minor Win.
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As it turns out, it was a bit of a design flaw. On the original Lightning Link, the slot was a low limit slot featuring four denominations, from 1 cent to 10 cent. The highest the Minor could get under that structure was $500, with the major starting from $500 and growing up to a max of $1,000.
That was all good, but then came Dragon Link. One improvement made was to offer more denominations. But the structure of the Major never changed – it was still the same progressive range across all denominations.
Once you start putting up bigger denominations, it pushes the value of the Minor up top over the Major. It’s just the nature of how that particular game was built out.
Aristocrat, the company that makes these lines of slots, eventually began to set up multiple Major progressives that were linked to a denomination or set of denominations. That helped counteract the imbalance that popped up when the game expanded its denominations, and helped to minimize those types of quirks.
The thing that players should realize, though, is those Mini and Minor “jackpots” are really just credit prizes. $100 as a credit prize and $100 as a Mini is the same thing – it’s just two ways to write it on the fireball. It was a clever trick to make players think they were winning more “jackpots” when there’s really only two true progressive jackpots on offer.
This was one of many things that other games picked up on, and is now a pretty common staple of slots. Some adjust the flat jackpots by bet level, which means there truly is a point within the pay structure for these, but when they stay the same across a whole denomination, they’re often more window dressing than anything else.
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