Well, time for a little test
Ruby Fortune laboratories
I have a lucky draw till Friday, deposit 50 and wager 1x for each entry.
I will therefore deposit and wager several blocks of 50 on MEGA MOOLAH, and see what I see (I know from past experience what I SHOULD see).
Results are in
Base game seems normal - eg, TIGHT as ever
300 spins, ONE free spin round after 74 spins, nothing else. It paid 75 from a 2-50 per spin bet.
Total wagered 750, and ended 150 down DESPITE the bonus round.
A jackpot was won only ONCE during the session lasting 26 minutes. Unusual, but not impossible, HOWEVER, when it was won it was over 200, AND reset to 120 and not 10 as normal.
The minor climbed from 1455 to 2003, and the mini had climbed back to 278 at the end of the 20 minutes.
Looking in later, the Minor was around 600 and the Mini a mere 50.
Looks to me like they have added a "reserve pot" for the resets, so that the reset is not simply back to 10 credits. It is also possible that they have added an adjustment for CURRENCY either with, or instead of, a reserve pot. This means that if the Minor or Mini is won in a currency such as the dollar or the SA Rand, it only takes the equivalent in UK Pounds from the pot, and leaves the rest as a reset value. We KNOW this happened when the MEGA was first won in SA Rand, it only lost a small fraction of it's value, but this has NEVER been the case for the Minor or Mini, which have reset to 100 and 10 irrespective of the currency they were last paid in. The INTERVAL between hits has been much reduced. The annoying "another player has won the jackpot" only came the once, whereas the Mini would rarely make it past 20 before hitting, and would hit once every minute or so at times.
The changes probably do NOT affect the overall RTP, and merely ensure the Minor and Mini are not so worthless when they are hit. Most players will ONLY ever win one or the other.
What MG DIDN'T do was announce this MAJOR change as an "upgrade" which they should have done when publicising the new games. The change is VERY significant, and to most progressive players would be seen as a GOOD thing, but the fact that MG sought to get away with yet another quiet "fix" only undermines the trust players have that the OLD games never really change, and that it's just our brains THINKING something has changed.
Now, MG have set a precedent, they WILL and DO change the OLD games if they think they need a popularity boost. The other changes seem to have affected low variance slots, and seem to have been designed to increase the variance towards that experienced with the very popular Thunderstruck slots.
How they can change variance without changing paytables or reels is a puzzle given what they CLAIM are how the slots work, but are NO MYSTERY for anyone who has played UK AWP machines, or the newer 500 pseudo-slots (which, because of a loophole in TAX laws, are really BINGO games that display the winning amounts as a slot result - random they are, but they are NOT slots, if they were, they would have been illegal, whereas "bingo" was LEGAL(ish) in machine form, and reel analysis will NOT give you a true answer to the odds and variance of the payouts).