Core: Allow 'HintGame' Clients to Give Hint Points

[Thegamefire]

What feature would you like to see?

I very much like the idea of hint games, but the fact that they are only really able to give a hint over a location in your game as opposed to a hint to an item you need makes them quite useless. I propose for clients with the tag 'HintGame' to be allowed to sent a "give hint" command that gives enough hint points for one hint.

[Rooby-Roo]

I like this idea. I think it's cute. Would definitely need some work on the backend, though, because IIRC hint points are not actually ever stored as a value anywhere; the number of hint points you have is calculated dynamically based on the locations checked, the points-per-check host.yaml value, the current hint cost, and the total number of hints you have already purchased. A solution to implement this will need to rework hint points to store some sort of absolute value of points, or otherwise adjust this dynamic formula to allow for arbitrary additions.

[FlitPix]

a couple things worth considering, from a design and gameplay perspective:

• a hint for a location in the connected game is not useless. if that location has filler, you now no longer have to check it, so you can skip it in favor of other locations that may be more important. if it has progression, you now know that you may have to do it and thus can prioritize it.
• part of the point of hint games is that you can play them while BK'ed. with that in mind, it makes sense that it's not that powerful. the ability to let you hint anything is too much imo.

despite that, i think the ability to give some amount of hint points does have potential as a fun alternative to hinting a random location. i just don't think it should be enough for a guaranteed free hint, even for very difficult hint games where it could be said to be a worthy reward. that's much too powerful imo.

...at the same time, it would be up to hint game devs whether they want to keep hinting locations, or do this instead. so it wouldn't be bad if this were added.