I feel a lot of peoples frustrations.
The thing that started me modding in CK3 was my attempt to add gay marriage to the game. I added a new doctrine level called celebrated, so I could reform religions to allow same sex marriage. For me personally fit well into my view of what the religion reformation mechanics where for, to give you the freedom to change societies views on things. Found out it was hard coded against, but that it still worked for concubines. Then I decided to apply this concept of "celebrated" to all the crime doctrines, so that way you could have a difference between accepted (i.e. not persecuted) and celebrated (i.e. actually supported). I've been working on fleshing out what that would mean for all the crimes doctrines (been slow at it as I should be actually working on my thesis), but always with the intention that gay marriage would be the Same-Sex Celebrated doctrine's effect (and same-sex concubines being the stand in for now). I even spent the time to get all my concubine code updated for the new patch, plus add some new opinion modifiers; before realizing it was hard coded against. So, now I'm left with a mod that has an effect for the celebrated version of every crime doctrine, except the one I actually care about.
This didn't really have a point, just wanted to share with someone. Also I want to add that I don't think Paradox did this intentionally; in fact, I'm sure they'd rather it be possible. But that doesn't mean it isn't still a sad turn of events for me personally.
But I am also glad the dev team seems to recognize this as an issue (and thanks
@blackninja9939 for taking the time to respond to this thread, it means a lot to me
). And while I wish it would be a higher priority, I can totally understand that modding, in general, is low priority.
So, optimistically looking forward to when I can go back to creating my gay celebrating religions (without having to revert back to an old version of the game, and loose out on all the new goodies). Hopefully it won't be too long.
As an author of a mod that utilized same-sex concubines, I'm a bit hesitant about this sort of answer because I frequently checked my logs (and the game) for errors when making sure it all ran correctly, and I certainly never noticed anything directly related to it (I needed to add some additional checks for niche cases due to how I implemented it, but that was it). It was certainly close enough to "working" such that I noticed no problems during a couple of hundred in-game years where both myself and the AI made use of the feature.
While my mod adding same-sex concubines did have errors, they were do to my doings (it was my first major foray into modding CK3). Though I did eventually get my mod to run without error before the new patch came out. And as far as I could tell the mod was working as intended. But that's I think the issue. We, as modders, don't have the same level of feedback that Paradox does, so we might not realize the script is causing an error in some edge case (and even a really small percentage edge case can represent thousands of players for Paradox). Plus, not all errors are going to show in the log, some are going to require players to point them out with bug reports.
If this is something that the dev team wants, and if players were already able to achieve something similar on our own, I'd really just like to understand why same-sex concubinage was treated as a bug. If it's something you want in the game but haven't implemented, how is players being able to implement it a bug? Why actively add hard code to the game to stop players from doing it? These sound like rhetorical questions, I know, but I genuinely want to understand the rationale here.
I also don't really understand the response to the question of why the hard code preventing marriage wasn't removed or why it was added to begin with. Yeah, mods might produce bugs. They often do. They're mods - why does Paradox care if players can implement something buggy in this case, but not in the case of every other buggy mod? Why is the softcode check not sufficient to stop bugs related to same-sex marriage from appearing in the base game?
I appreciate the fact that we're getting a response. I just feel like this patch raises more questions than the response answers.
I have no evidence for this. But my personal guess is that there were circumstance where the code, when getting a new concubine, needed to checked for the requirements of being a concubine. But this code would bypass or not properly evaluate the script, thus causing it to give a faulty results. That result proabably being that it allowed a concubine to go through that shouldn't (not necessarily related to same-sex, or at least exclusively). Thus they decided to hard-code the requirements to stop these leaks (maybe even with the idea that this was a temporary fix). And when doing so copied all the in game requirements to this new hard-coded check with opposite-sex being one of the requirements and thus added in with the rest.
When someone struggling with their identity gets ahold of a role-playing game it often helps them figure things out. I've honestly seen more posts than I'd have expected from other queer people on social media mentioning how games like the Sims were one of their few outlets to express their sexuality or gender identity when they were still in the closet.
I remember doing this way back in the first Sims game when I was a kid.