What do you think? Spaghetti code

[Packetdancer]

Do you think the game is still heavily plagued by spaghetti code?

On the server side in particular? Abso-fricking-lutely, yes. Based on every bit of my own experience, I have close to zero doubt that the codebase for the server side of this game is some sort of nightmare-inducing disaster. Because, after a certain amount of time, most complex server systems are a nightmare-inducing disaster, unless you periodically refactor it, or go in with a lengthy architecture phase looking to future-proof it. (And even then the latter isn't always enough.)

And most aren't done on an incredibly short and rushed development cycle as the ARR relaunch was.

We know the client shares no code with 1.x, because it was written on an entirely different engine. But I would be at least mildly surprised if the server codebase didn't reuse some of the 1.x code.

The client? I could go either way on that one. But the server? Yes, I absolutely believe the server codebase is a mess, especially with the game having been out this long.

What are the limitations caused by spaghetti codes that still exist to this day?

That's harder to say without knowing what modules of the server ecosystem the worst spaghetti code might be in.

But one of the most common issues with "spaghetti code" scenarios is having one piece of code that depends on another piece of code which depends on another piece of code which was written for a previous project by someone who's not with the company anymore, and where no one entirely knows how that one piece works because it's a big tangled mess of undocumented code that was written quickly... but everyone's afraid to modify it too heavily because there's likely a bunch of undocumented (and non-obvious) quirks which those different systems built atop it silently rely on.

Do you think spaghetti code is just an excuse made up by devs and not a real issue?

I am absolutely certain it's a real issue. Both just by observing some of how this game works, and from all my own experience in the field.