I don't think there's been this much hoopla about resurrection since JC
in 30 AD and since I didn't see the original circus, I'm trying to
get on board with this one. Let's introduce the players before I
start this new, slightly modified Sermon on the Mount. I'll be Jesus
of course, because I forgot to shave my beard this morning. Other
supporting characters who have taken part in this conversation before
me are as follows, and please for God's sake (or my sake in this version)
don't say you want a higher billing than what you've been given:

Delveling as Simon Peter
Tarken as Judas Iscariot

Other Apostles:

Xyloid: Athos
Pyggins: Porthos
Nepos: Aramis
Zerks: Sandwich Joe

So let's start the story. If I have understood correctly, a resurrection
fumble lead to a loss of level, gaining of age and Delveling going on a break
like we're watching Ross and Rachel on Friends reruns again. We get it,
it's really, really annoying. It's almost like someone who originally coded
that wanted dying to be a negative thing. We can probably argue about the
harshness of penalties or fumbles, but even then our opinions are subjective.
Some people prefer not to have any penalties whatsoever and think that
all play should automatically lead into progress. Other people feel like
there should be risks or adversities to overcome. Personally I would prefer
some excitement and some risks, but nothing that is impossible to overcome.
If you ask me, all things considered, we're somewhere in the ballpark.
My personal opinion, however, is not very crucial because when it comes
to harshness, I can go either way. For me it's not really a dealbreaker. When
it comes to this particular fumble or the fumble effect, I'd rather not say
what we should do because I'm not really leaning to any particular direction.
Nonetheless, I feel like always speaking of "ways to lose playerbase" when
something nasty happens is something of a cheap shot, because people are
divided with their opinions and blaming one singular aspect for something
presents somewhat black and white perspective. But let's talk about
something concrete.

I should probably mention that there has been discussion about this topic
on wizard channels and some wizards have been checking the resurrection
code if there indeed is something wrong in it. I should maybe also point
out that I've been checking the logs to see how frequent fumbling really is.
I also tried to find out information about Pyggins' secondary character but
a quick fingering also tells me that the character has not been online for
four months so I couldn't really find data that I could check concerning this
particular character that was used as an example in the newspost that
Delveling was referring to. Looking at the recent numbers, about 0.6% of all
resurrections have been fumbles, but two days ago it was more like 1.0% since
the log file has since changed and been modified. Of course I should mention
that in some of these cases some guys appear to be a target of fumbled spell
more than once, suggesting that there has been a factor that makes them
targeted more frequently. These are also just any fumbles and most likely
level loss has not occurred every time. What the actual fumble rate is can
probably be found from the code, but I think these ballpark figures give
a picture what we are basically talking about. I don't think it's terribly
high ratio, but I guess it's a very subjective opinion and for someone who
is target of fumble, any fumble is probably one too many. When it comes
to Pyggins' old post, we don't even know for sure if his post was just
ignored because it's entirely possible someone checked the code but
didn't find anything abnormal about it and therefore didn't think it was
necessary to address the issue further.

BatMUD is an old game that is turning 25 years in April. During this time we
have had hundreds of developers writing code into this game. Xyloid asked
in his newspost why is this piece of resurrection code like this. At this
point the most honest answer is that probably nobody really knows. I can't
even tell how long this piece of code has been there. The world is vast and
every once in a while you stumble into something that you're not entirely sure
about if it still has place in the game. During the course of time the game
has gotten rid of true steal. The streets are less packed with exploding
wands of armour destruction, disintegrate is milder and multicoloured
demons have been in hibernation for a longer time now. In the old times
loss of equipment set was met with sardonic "help reimbursement" reply
from an archwizard just to show that there is no such helpfile while this
year I've even invested my own time restoring some well-earned equipment
for guys whose primary reason of messing up had been drinking Ron de Jeremy
so long that the face on the bottle starts to look blurry without the help
of Finnish Authority for Welfare and Health. While you may choose to believe
that we do something like this for our own masochistic amusement, I'd like
to think that quite many of us are investing our personal time to create
an interesting game for people to enjoy. Sometimes we succeed better and
sometimes we do worse, but we try to learn from that. So even if Delveling so
eloquently stated that we don't care or have an interest or that we exist
only to create penalizing processes to lose playerbase, I'm sure there
are plenty of examples that hopefully prove otherwise.

If I go through, let's say hundreds or a thousand resurrect casts, the
ballpark figures for fumble percent is somewhat representative statistically
even if I'm not aiming for full scientific credibility. However, the side
effect is that if I'm now using this same data to pick the singular fumbles, I
have a number that a yakuza can gesture with his fingers. To make a
statistical analysis of this and showing the spread by levels would be waste
of everybody's time. We can also argue that there is likely to be other
factors weighing in and level is not the only factor which would make this
kind of representation inaccurate and incomplete. While I do agree that given
a large sample to analyze we might be able to draw some data, I regret to tell
you that this kind of data is not readily at my disposal, so I won't be
publishing any figures about that.