Tailor Archive

I started out my test with just enough Scout to get Mask Scent (Mask Scent skill 20). Stood outside my house, with normal clothing on, hit Mask. Took 2 minutes for it to wear off. Put on an outfit with a total bonus of +26 to Camo and Mask (entirely through tissues, no SEA involved). Displayed Mask Scent skill 20/46. Presume that the 25 point cap is in place, this should give me an effective Mask Scent skill of 45. Hit Mask and wait. 2 minutes for it to wear off.

There are three things that Mask Scent lists as effected by increased points in the skill on the tooltip:

1.) Ability to mask vs. badder beastes.

2.) Increased duration of mask

3.) reduced time between creature breaking the mask, and when you can reapply it.

So, #2 is not affected by the BE tissue bonus.

I have noticed that my 'recycle' time when a creature breaks my mask to be something around 50 seconds. So I went off to find a bunch of beasties, and got 'discovered'... hit 'Mask' and it says... you must wait 48 seconds to attempt to mask scent again.

Wheee - #3 is not affected by the bonus either.

And I'm not sure how to test #1.

So I figured maybe it was just a really TINY bonus. I happen to have enough XP to get to skill box III and have a natural 40 points in Mask Scent. So, I gave up Artisan Eng IV (like I've made a whole lot of Bone Armor lately?) and now my Mask Scent is at 40 naturally. Guess what - 4 minutes of Mask Scent time when standing outside. And with the +26 bonus clothing on? 4 minutes. Well, I for one won't be selling any Mask Scent clothing until I can demonstrate it as working myself.

Sounds like a definite bug.

The medical stats have been shown experimentally to work (BE/Tailor clothes), and SEAs have been shown to work now at least with experimentation skills (easy to check - you do, or do not, get 1 extra experimentation point per 10 pts of skill).

Hmm as far as I remember, the mask scent skill didn't change anything but the rate of detection from exploration 2 to 3 and 3 to 4. So I would think that it's what it changes too.

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Songe wrote:
Hmm as far as I remember, the mask scent skill didn't change anything but the rate of detection from exploration 2 to 3 and 3 to 4. So I would think that it's what it changes too.

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My experience is that from 20 - 40 base skill the total scent time and recycle time in the event of discovery both improve (from 2min to 4min in the case of mask time, from about 50 to about 40 in the case of recycle time). In both the case of 20 and 40, adding 25points in clothing make no measurable change in either total scent time nor recycle time. If this is 'working as intended', I'm not sure how exactly I'm going to make sales pitch on this.

I have heard about modded clothing not taking effect for 10 or 15 minutes. Perhaps retry after a generous wait.

Smi

I haven't tested it very well, but I have made an enhanced outfit for myself (a simple one that doesn't fail when I try to make it) that brings my mask scent bonus up to +98. So far absolutely nothing has broken my mask scent, including accidently running through three dens of tusk cats on the way to a harvester. I was so sure that one of the kitties was going to kill me!

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Gyopi wrote:
I haven't tested it very well, but I have made an enhanced outfit for myself (a simple one that doesn't fail when I try to make it) that brings my mask scent bonus up to +98. So far absolutely nothing has broken my mask scent, including accidently running through three dens of tusk cats on the way to a harvester. I was so sure that one of the kitties was going to kill me!

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Gyopi - can you tell me the difference in your total mask scent time wih and without the outfit? Also, the recycle time?

I have to check the times, but my mask scent before putting on the clothing is +70. It is +98 after. I kept a lot of scouting skills because I tend to put my harvesters in dangerous places, but I don't fight very well. I will have to check the times for it, but I don't think that it changes that at all.

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Gyopi wrote:
I have to check the times, but my mask scent before putting on the clothing is +70. It is +98 after. I kept a lot of scouting skills because I tend to put my harvesters in dangerous places, but I don't fight very well. I will have to check the times for it, but I don't think that it changes that at all.

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We have a number of facts to work with:

• We are given only one stat to look at (Mask Scent)
  
• The description states that 3 things are improved with a higher value in Mask Scent (greater hide success chance, longer mask length and reduced cycle time on broken mask)
  
• Two of the factors are easily observed, for me, neither one improves due to clothing, but both improve due to skill box bonus
  

There are three possible explainations that I can see:

1. Bonus from clothing is ignored entirely
   
2. Description is incorrect, bonus from clothing is only supposed to benefit success chance, not the timers.
   
3. Description is correct, implimentation is bugged for timers but works correctly for success chance.
   

I think #1 is most likely... it just seems strange to me that #2 would be true - why would they 'subdivide' a skill this way (and reduce the usefulness of the Mask Scent tissue)? The difference between #1 and #3 is hard because we don't have a simple test for success chance (it requires a statistically significant sampling, which is to say, it's a pain for us as players to gather data on).

It would be helpful to know how the success chance is calculated. I'm nearly certain it is not as simple as 'Mask Scent = % chance to successfully hide from any given "check" of scenting' because at Mask Scent of 20, I was definitely NOT being discovered by 80% of all reds. If the improvement is linear in some way by the Mask Scent skill, then the effects of a working bonus at 20->46 (more than doubling) should be much more obvious than the effects at 70->98 (increase of about 1/3). On top of all this, the dramatic change in scent mask time from 20 (2 minutes) to 40 (4 minutes) granted by a skill box would tend to indicate that clothing bonus would be much more noticable to people with low levels of Mask Scent to begin with.

This thread

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=bio-engineer&message.id=24895

tends to show that it works, actually.