Sources, in order of trust
- Aristocrat itself — the game pages and catalogue on aristocratgaming.com, archived versions of Aristocrat's older sites, and its company announcements. This is where titles, launch dates, features and cabinets come from.
- Regulators and standards — the Gaming Machine National Standard used across Australia and each state's appendix, gaming acts and regulations, and regulators' own pages. This is where minimum returns, maximum bets and venue rules come from.
- Venues — the gaming page of the club, pub or casino. A venue is listed as having Dragon Link only when its own website says so, and the date we read it is shown.
Review sites, forums and sites with "Dragon Link" in their domain name are used only as leads to check. They're never quoted as the source of a fact.
When nobody publishes the number
Aristocrat doesn't publish the return to player of the venue versions of its games, and venues don't either. So we don't print one. Instead we give the rule that does exist — the minimum return each state requires — and say plainly that the exact figure for a machine isn't public. The same goes for anything else we can't trace: the page says it's unknown rather than borrowing a number.
The tools on the home page
- The Hold & Spin demo is our own simplified model in credits. It shows how orbs lock and how the respin counter resets; its odds and prizes are ours, not Aristocrat's, and no money is involved.
- The budget check does plain arithmetic: how many spins a budget covers if every spin loses, and what 100 spins cost on average at the lowest return a state allows (85%) and at 90%. Real sessions swing far above and below that average.
Images
Game art belongs to Aristocrat and is shown only to identify the game, with a caption naming where it came from. The author portrait is an illustration. We don't use stock photos and we don't draw anything to look like a real photo of a venue.
Dates and corrections
Each page shows two dates: when it was first published and when it was last checked. The second one moves only when we re-check the facts or change what the page says. If you find an error, tell us — we fix it and update the date.