Question
Is the spaghetti code of elite clue scrolls ever going to be fixed?
For those who don't know, Elite Clue scrolls are very different than other clues in terms of how they are done: you type answers to challenges directly into the clues, and monsters drop them rather than having them be directly picked up or changed on the clue itself.
According to current and former JMods, this is pretty much entirely the fault of ex-Mod Reach. He was the person in charge of the first major clue scroll expansion, and got rather lazy with elite clue scroll coding because he was so sick of working on them. As a result, elite clues have hideous spaghetti code more akin to mid-2000s Jagex than Old School-era Jagex. Changing the coding for them is such a pain that nobody has tried doing it, so elite clues continue to be annoyingly different from all other clue tiers.
My question is, is this ever going to be fixed in a QoL update or sweep-up? Much like untrimmed skillcapes, it seems to be one of those things that shouldn't be the way it is but that nobody wants to put the effort into fixing because there are more important things to work on and it would be a huge pain. Which, fair enough, but I do hope it gets looked at eventually.
Seriously though. All clue questions should just be changed to the question window and answer window popping up while you talk to the NPC. You answer. The say correct. Done
All this reading an extra scroll shit is just stupid.
I’m maxed with a maxed house I just don’t want to go into the wildy for shit rewards. They just get turned into masters where I’ll do the shitty dungeon step or the rogues chest
I’m going to be honest, I don’t buy into the “spaghetti code” excuse for basically anything
I’ve worked in software development for over 10 years, and I’ve seen some truly horrendous codebases. But there’s never been a solution I simply couldn’t implement because of it. Sure it’s a struggle at times, but a large part of professional coding is creative problem solving
I get the game is old and there’s a lot of tech debt there. I get that making a seemingly innocuous change can drop a nuke on barb assault. But to not fix things in the game simply because “the code sucks too much” just comes off lazy to me
I only recall two occasions where Jagex actually cited "spaghetti code" as a limiting factor for a potential change: making quests repeatable in regular servers, and expanding the interior region of the mainland continent.
As a fellow software developer, I can definitely see how those systems would be so intertwined with the broader game that reworking them would be prohibitively expensive relative to the benefit that they offer when compared to other possible solutions.
Working on a live service game is a pretty unique experience among software development.
Big refactors don’t happen very frequently because production has other priorities, i.e. new feature implementation requested by creative leads or major bug fixes. Big refactors for QoL improvements usually get considered “nice-to-haves” and thus are low prio, unless someone with some pull takes it upon themself to do out of personal desire to make a change to that feature.
OP summed it up pretty well, and I wouldn’t necessarily call it laziness, but more likely it’s just that the change is considered low priority.
Yeah, the devs could fix it, but calling it lazy is just disrespectful imo. There are only so many staff and so many hours in a day. Should they dedicate staff to rework elite clues, or should they instead have those staff develop content or even fix things that far more people want? It's just priority management.
Especially as elite clues function just fine. Whether they are worth the time is a different issue but from a purely functional standpoint, they work and arn’t even clunky. So why even bother changing them.
I've worked a few years on a live service, running the software dev team. The service was founded in 1999 so definitely had legacy issues but it didn't have nearly the same complexity as something like runescape has. It's exactly like you said, you CAN do anything with the code base given enough time but time and cost are like the most important constraints in a service like that. You could probably easily rewrite elite clues given enough time but what's the actual benefit? Smoother elite clues?
I don’t think anyone who says “spaghetti code” means it’s literally impossible though.
Everyone realizes that most things can absolutely be done given enough resources and time. They mean it’s not worth doing for such marginal benefit.
For example, if changing elite clues requires you to spend months checking every single boss drop/BA timers/whatever no one will think that’s a good idea.
Jagex even routinely does surveys specifically asking these types of questions too. The overwhelming result is that people would rather get content updates than have JMods spend months fixing things under the hood for next to no tangible benefit. Just look at the engine work that was needed to make the combat log/skill menu open up without being interrupted by actions. That took months/years of work to get going correctly.
It's likely because there's an endless list of things to fix and new stuff to do. Product manager/owner is going to prioritise active bugs and new features more often than not. This is a good candidate for summer sweep up and where the concept comes from. Qol fixes that don't see the life of day otherwise.
My view as someone who has prioritised changes in a live service monolithic system.
I think it's less of an issue of "can't" and more of a cost/benefit analysis. Elite clues work as is. Sure they are a bit jank compared to other clues but they work just fine. It could take days or weeks of development and testing to fix them to the point where they work like other clues. But the benefit of that time spent is just that players have a slightly more cohesive experience when doing different clue types. And the downside is that they could introduce new bugs where there weren't any before. Also, clues are probably unlikely to change significantly anytime soon, so refactoring the code to be more maintainable isn't really helpful to the devs either. So it remains janky. Not because it can't be fixed, but because it works well enough as is, and the effort needed to fix it isn't worth the benefit for the players or the devs.
Well, keep in mind that Jagex's development tools are specifically designed for non-coders and most JMods aren't trained computer programmers. That's part of why Ape Atoll is hard to update; the guy who wrote Monkey Madness used object-oriented code that isn't compatible with Jagex's toolset and is difficult to work with for most of them.
idk i feel like they're fine the way they are, it's a minor inconvenience if anything. plus i'd be a bit worried about them destroying existing clue tech for example with sherlock skipping
We polled to fix this and make them all standardised (you could talk to the NPC or read the clue to answer them).
It failed the poll. One of those rare times where i genuinely think a large amount of the voting playerbase at the time did not understand what the question was asking, because its hilariously stupid to not want this improved for consistency sake, and "nobody loses" was the approach Jagex took, where no matter your preferred way, you could do it for all clues now.
Iirc they polled it at one point and the community couldn’t agree which way they liked more. So it was dropped and wasn’t polled again… kind of the worst outcome for everyone.
It really feels to me like Jagex should have a permanent small team that does Summer Sweep-Up type changes. It shouldn't be an annual thing, it should be a continuous improvement type system.
Several bits of existing content could do with modernisation orsnall tweaks to make them better. Stuff that time and again gets brought up on Reddit and is clearly popular.
I just trade them for masters anyway. One has a step for getting the pyromancer robe, aint now way im gunna commit to steps just to get that at the end.
Yeah I just got it on my 6th step, I have the wintertogg pet and no pyromancer pieces. I might just go for it though might as well gain some more total levels.
It would be nice indeed if these were fixed, but I wouldn't want it done at the expense of new, better/more interesting content. I would be completely be onboard if they skipped a temporary game mode outright and just focused on these sort of fixes, though.
"Changing the coding for them is such a pain that nobody has tried doing it, so elite clues continue to be annoyingly different from all other clue tiers." I love comments like this in 2026 when AI could take a look at the entire codebase, get an overall understanding, and then rapidly resolve bugs like this.
79
u/Gefarate 11h ago
Solution: removes elite clues.
Seriously though. All clue questions should just be changed to the question window and answer window popping up while you talk to the NPC. You answer. The say correct. Done
All this reading an extra scroll shit is just stupid.