Hints could be done better

[BloodRaven0]

The hints are a nice addition to the game, since the "no guessing mode" option literally never works, especially on standard games, where mine density is about 30%. However, the nature of their implementation could be improved:

First off, you only get 2 hints per game, no matter what difficulty it was. This makes it meaningless to "farm" hints on anything but beginner, and undervalues the hint rewards from harder difficulties. I propose the hint reward to be a percentage of the mines present, which would work well even in custom games - perhaps 10% - this would make beginner's reward 1 hint, intermediate - 4, standard - 5, and so on. You could also work in the mine density into the formula if you'd like, so people can't exploit it by making a huge custom game with lots of mines, but low density, for one-click wins. Given that currently I have to use 5-10 hints on a standard game due to guessing scenarios, the reward of 2 I get at the end is sorely insufficient, and I'm forced for "farm" on beginner, which is not fun.

Another way to do it is to remove hint rewards entirely, and always give the player a set number of hints per game, again a percentage of the total mines. This is better for the huge "Master" and "Legend" difficulties, where 25 hints couldn't possibly carry you through a "no guessing mode" fail, whereas on beginner, you get more hints than there are mines on the field. 10% of mines present sounds like a good amount of hints per game.

The reason I use so many hints lie in their randomness. Instead of showing me a mine in a place that would help me the most, it often shows me one next to an outlying square I've revealed that doesn't help me at all, and I have to waste another hint hoping for a more useful one. I could flag mines next to squares I DON'T want the hint to be, but that's tedious and confusing. Given that there already is a (extremely inefficient) way of selecting where you want your hint to be, I propose letting the user select it manually. For example, the user could drag the hint icon from the corner to the square they need a hint for, and it would automatically either open the square or flag it. This would be more streamlined and helpful and reduce the need for hint spamming a bit.

[lucasnlm]

I hope to introduce this feature on 14.0.0. I will implement using the 10% of mines ideia.

[im7mortal]

I think it belongs here. Hints are pretty dumb now. I am playing 9x9 with 35 mines, and it what I have (on picture[on the pic I put some probable mine assumptions, so I still needed hints even one 3 had all 3 mines])

I see at least 2 variants.

1. Hint allow to you choose for which cube you want it
2. Hint just appears randomly(maybe in place where it reduces minimum entropy what probably complicated to implement) Thank you!

[im7mortal]

Just came back to the same game which I did not finish. And so many hints I needed before one usefull comed up

[gboehl]

I also find the documented issue (hints appear at random places where they are not helpful at all) problematic.

Wouldn't the simplest solution be to restrict hints to fields that are adjacent to already revealed fields?

Many thanks for this wonderful app, btw!