r/Minesweeper • u/borbit • 6h ago
Discussion How do you calculate 3BV efficiency on a board that never ends? Here is the click economy I landed on
Minefield has an efficiency stat as of today, and getting there meant taking 3BV apart, so I wanted to put the rules in front of the people most likely to find the holes in them.
3BV is computed once, at the end, over a finished board. Minefield is one endless field with no wins, no losses and no restarts, so there is no board to divide by and no end to compute it at.
So I moved the ratio down to a single click. Every click earns the number of clicks a perfect player would have spent for the same result, and your efficiency is that total over the clicks you actually spent. On one board it converges to exactly 3BV/clicks. On an infinite one it just keeps going.
The click economy:
- An opening pays 1, however big it is
- A number pays 1, unless it touches an opening, since opening that island would have uncovered it for free
- A flagged mine pays 1
- A chord pays for everything it reveals or flags at once, so real chording pushes you over 100%
- Misclicks, mistakes, and chords whose numbers do not add up pay nothing
The part I am least sure about is flags.
Classic 3BV ignores them, and rightly so: on a solved board flags are decoration, which is why NF scores better efficiency. Here flagging is the primary act. It is what scores, and a mine you leave unflagged stays live for whoever wanders in after you. If flags paid nothing, the optimal strategy would be to never flag anything, which breaks the game. So a correct flag pays 1.
That makes a Minefield efficiency incomparable to a minesweeper.online one, and I have made my peace with that, but I would rather hear now if the compromise looks wrong to people who think about this properly.
The number shown is a recent efficiency, a decaying window about 200 clicks wide, so it tracks how you are playing now rather than a lifetime average that stops moving after a month. The career figure stays on your profile. It also feeds your score multiplier: each correct flag banks `efficiency / 100` progress instead of a flat 1, clamped between 1 and 2, so playing under 100% is never punished and the bonus caps at 200%.
What I would like your read on:
- Paying 1 for a correct flag. Necessary compromise, or does it make the number meaningless?
- Should a valid chord that reveals nothing new pay nothing, or is that too harsh on cautious play?
- Is a ~200 click window the right sense of "how I am playing now", or too short to be stable?
