Has anyone noticed a problem where, despite promoting RALFism and having 90%+ SOULs in heaven as RALFists, most Heavenly residents are Permanent Residents?

(Background: RALFism is Reincarnation Always Loops Fate. These are supposed to be temporary residents only and should eventually go to a Karma Station to leave your Afterlife and free up capacity.)

===EDIT #1===

Screenshots to demonstrate the problem.

97% of Blessed SOULs are RALFists, meaning that they believe in reincarnation and should eventually leave the Afterlife.

Simultaneously, over 90% (I'm eyeballing this, but it looks like over 90% to me) of Blessed SOULs are Permanent Residents, meaning that they don't intend to leave the Afterlife, ever.

It's possible that this is a classic bug that I just didn't notice or remember from when I was a kid 19 years ago, in which case, fat chance of getting this fixed. :P

===EDIT #2===

The Internet Archive has Afterlife Version 1.1 (whereas the GOG product is version 1.0), and it has the same problem with RALFists in Heaven.

It's worth noting that Hell does not have this issue in either version. Hell seems to handle RALFists as I would expect.

Maybe they were converted after finding out they were entering the Pearly Gates? ;)

The permanent v. temporary may only categorize SUSA v. SUMA and HAHA v. HOHO (for permanent SOULs in Hell), and not ALF v. RALF, though. If you bring up SOULs in the SOUL viewer, does it say how much longer they have in the afterlife? If you do this consistently with that high a percentage of RALFists and the SOUL viewer also thinks they are permanent, then it may be a bug.

I have not noticed this, since I usually do not manipulate population beliefs except to be AAAA. (I will sometimes do virtues, like Peaceful, because I don't want nuclear war to break out.)

Another tangentially-related aside, I have heard that the longer your reincarnation path, the more likely it is that reincarnated SOULs will become ALFists instead of RALFists. So, if you want RALFists, you will want a short path.

Hey, I also played this game back in the day and have just repurchased it from GoG. I intend to complete a project which I never did while in college, namely, a billion souls in both heaven and hell, plus one of each reward/punishment type. I believe I can do this, since the only real difficulty is ensuring to get one of each of the low level rewards/punishments early, before building the larger afterlife--these structures won't spawn late.

Anyway, to answer your question, I don't think it's a problem. Rather, it's an unexpected effect of how the numbers work correctly. Say half of all EMBOs believe in reincarnation and half don't. After a thousand years, half stay and half go back to the planet. But the ones who go back to the planet are 50% likely to believe in reincarnation and 50% likely not to. So, on the second visit, half stay and half go back to the planet. After two cycles, 75% have stayed permanently. On the third cycle, only 25% of the original EMBOs reincarnate, the ones who believed in RALFism BOTH times. And of those, next time they visit the afterlife, half of them will be staying permanently...so after three cycles it's 87.5% permanent. Eventually, everyone stays.

I also got frustrated by this in my latest game and couldn't really understand it.

For what it's worth, I read somewhere that making the tracks to the reincarnation areas as short as possible helps EMBOs continue to believe in reincarnation when they reach the planet. Apparently they forget about the afterlife if the trip is too long.