Legalize Gay Modding!

[DebbieElla]

Stay on topic, stay kind.

 

[DebbieElla]

Another reminder to stay on topic and stay kind. We've had to delete a lot of toxic posts, and if this continues I will lock the thread. Please remember our rules.

 

[blackninja9939]

Someone poked me that whilst we'd acknowledged this thread in other place and on other socials we'd not actually put a dev comment in it, so I thought I'd do that real quick.

Simple answer is that if it was just a quick change we’d have already done it, but it’d be a bit more involved than that and compared to other needs for the project it’s not been a high priority to look at since modding requests are always low in the prio list.

I know it’s something multiple of the team do want as well, so it will likely get a look at in time. But yeah its not that we don't support having something in the game, we definitely do, it is as always with these things a matter of priority and development time not any of the pretty wild speculations in this thread

 

[blackninja9939]

Thanks for the reply.

While I understand that is not high on the priority, someone added new code to specifically block concubine/consort of same gender in 1.3.0. Reverting to before 1.3.0, this code was not present, so I don't know how to feel about this.

As with all those errors they exist so we can catch bugs in the base game, same sex concubines likely did not actually work and had bugs and the requirement was just not being explicitly checked in that effect despite being needed in the game. So someone on a bug fixing pass when fixing an issue related to that likely added that requirement in explicitly to aid with fixing our bugs tickets.

I understand that is probably not a satisfactory answer, but that is gonna be the reason. Any de-hardcoding needs to strike the balance of letting modders do what they want but also make sure that what is not used in the base game and is not part of the invariants we maintain needs to be checked and logged somewhere.

 

[blackninja9939]

Just want to add my voice here.

This whole situation has burned up years of goodwill that Paradox had built up with me up until this point in just months, in a way I'd never in my dreams have thought possible.

I work in backend tech at a video game developer in Dundee myself and I've had it playing in the back of my mind for a while now to maybe apply to Paradox and move to Stockholm as a sort of unlikely pipe dream scenario. Especially with how bitter a pill to swallow Brexit has been as an EU citizen living in the UK. I guess the last few years just keep on being filled with disappointment.

I honestly had so much respect and admiration for Paradox going into CK3. I've always raved about how good their games are to anyone who would listen and probably bored several people half to death with in-depth play-by-plays of the various empires and roleplay scenarios I've really gotten carried away with in Stellaris. I read every single Dev Diary each week leading up to CK3 and was honestly so freaking excited, like I can't really remember being that hyped about anything since a few years ago when I got my first car. I'm not even exaggerating.

But this has just left such an ugly taste in my mouth.

Stories are important. Stories are powerful. Stories matter. We imitate them and learn from them and are shaped by them. They are a reflection of the world, and conversely, human behaviour often changes to resemble them back.

This is why representation is so important for queer people in media. In a world without meaningful LGBT representation the message that you're sending to some poor closeted teen in a small intolerant town is that they're completely alone. That they aren't important. That they don't matter enough to tell stories about.

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.

Imagine discovering an honestly awesome game like CK3, with almost endless roleplay possibilities, only to find you can't even marry a same-sex partner. You can set up a cannibal cult and an empire with institutionalized incest, but marrying your character's literal same-sex romantic partner is arbitrarily off-limits. It just feels... terrible. I imagine it would feel even worse if you're unlucky enough to live in a regressive country that doesn't afford you that same right in your own life.

When I realized I couldn't marry a same-sex partner in the base game I immediately started looking into making a mod for it myself, and then I basically just went through several stages of disbelief, frustration, and dissapointment when I realized it wasn't possible at all.

And I just feel let down by you now, Paradox. It's probably a little irrational, but it's honestly how I feel. It has literally even soured my enjoyment of Stellaris (my all-time favourite game) by association.

I wish I could just not take it personally, but my life experiences are full of self-righteous cis straight people hurting me in ways they claimed weren't personal for my intrinsic characteristics. Queer people getting the short end of the stick once again in a thousand tiny ways shouldn't really come as much of a surprise, only it actually does hurt this time because I really didn't expect it coming from you.

I wasn't really going anywhere with this. Just venting. I'm going to stop playing CK3 for a while. I'll maybe check back in a year to see if anything's changed. Thank you for at least providing an answer, even if "you're not a high priority" wasn't what I wanted to hear.

You’re twisting my words there quite a bit, nobody is saying that representation isn’t important or that LGBT people aren’t either.

I came into this thread to explain that we understand your frustration that the project needs is our job to do and that has time spent on as a higher focus than mod support.

I could have not responded to this thread given that we’d already answered elsewhere, but I felt we owed it to people to have open communication since that is something we love of our community.

But I also don’t then think it’s unreasonable for me to expect people to not respond to that with hyperbole or thinly veiled implications that I or the rest of the team are anti LGBT, which is especially ludicrous given that our team has LGBT people in it (which is by no means a limit on other people caring about this too) and we’ve worked to improve representation in CK3 since it’s something a lot of us care about.

I know this response will probably also get me more disagrees and angry faces, but I came into this thread in my free time to be open with people so it didn’t seem like we were ignoring you even if I couldn’t come with an answer that would fix the problems for you. So I’d ask that whilst this is an important and sensitive topic to try and not twist our answers here into something they are clearly not.

 

[blackninja9939]

If you really like 'open communication', then why not communicate it before hand?
There is no mention of this change in the patch notes or anywhere else.

Really, it could have been very easily avoided by just being actually open about it.

In general communication around CK3 is a bit lackluster. The game in itself is amazing, the content is of very high quality, and there is obviously a huge amount of love and care that went into it. Which makes the issues in and around the game so glaring.
It feels like you (a general you, not you in particular) aren't very confident in your work?

Like, it's almost midnight here in France, so it must be very late in Sweden, and yet as you've said you're here to discuss about it. So you obviously care. So there is some kind of dissonance in communication that is kind of awkward? I don't know if I make myself very clear, sorry.

We don’t write a patch note for every single line of code we change, I’d assume that this change was done and it was not thought anything was using this script like this since base game content certainly was not.

We’re all pretty damn confident and proud of the game so not sure where you get the idea otherwise from.

It’s around midnight in Sweden too right now yeah!

 

[blackninja9939]

I've reread my post and I just want to apologize. It's an extremely personal topic and it's easy to get emotional. I for sure went too far. No excuses. And I just really want to stress that I'm sincerely grateful you chose to post in this thread tonight. Thank you.

Just to be clear, I don't think anyone here truly believes that you guys are anything other than well-meaning. It's just that for queer people it's a common lived experience to 'fall through the cracks', so to speak, in many video games. Same-sex love-interests often get cut in RPGs due to time constraints (in the best case, sometimes its due to censorship in a foreign market), or have less work put into them than their counterparts, or there are simply far less options. I assume something like this is what happened here on account of the realities of corporate budgets, deadlines, etc.

That's basically what was eating at me. Again though, I'm sorry for the way I brought it across.

I appreciate the apology, and honestly no hard feelings.
This is an important and personal topic for a lot of people and I get that shooting me as the messenger when I come without the desired answer is easy to do when people are frustrated!

I am gonna try and head off to sleep now since it is midnight and I do have work tomorrow, I’ll check on this thread tomorrow morning though I doubt I will have much else to add than what I’ve already said. We do see you and the frustration, I can’t promise a fix for X given date but it is something we are definitely aware of and do want to change once we get the time.

 

[PDX_Pariah]

Howdy everyone, and thanks for your patience. The Easter weekend is a long one here in Sweden, so as our Mod posted, we’ve all been out, but we’re back now, caught up on the thread, so here’s where we’re at.

Our commitment to providing more in-game options for same-sex relationships hasn’t changed since we first commented on this last month. We said we were looking into it, and we did, so good news there: same-sex concubines should be moddable in the game in an upcoming patch prior to 1.4, and we should have same-sex marriage moddable by 1.4 if everything goes as planned.

As for the removal of the “unofficial patch” around this change, any mod that directly modifies ck3.exe is strictly against our rules, and the ToS says as much. We simply cannot allow exe files to be distributed on our forum or any of our other community channels for a number of reasons, but primarily because they can’t be verified for security. There are bad actors out there and an unverified exe could have malware, datamining, keyloggers, or any number of ugly surprises, so regardless of what the content may actually be, they’re banned on sight. This has absolutely nothing to do with how any of us at Paradox feel about what a modder may have created or whether we agree with their intentions. No exe mods, period.

We wanted to give you this update on what we intend around this content. Hope to have more details soon!

 

[PDX_Pariah]

Delightful! I have to ask though, if you don't mind sharing, what issues came up that caused you to disable same-sex concubines in the first place?

Regardless, this is great news, thanks for finally getting back to us with a dev comment!

It was never our intention or direct goal to disable the feature. It was just a code by-product of a technical and unrelated issue that needed correcting. It has certainly caused some concern, but we are getting there!

Before engaging with the response, I wanted to mention a policy clarification I received from the moderators that might help avoid future messiness: apparently, discussing moderator actions is against the ToS. The proper action in such case is to contact the moderator who did it via PM, or, if you can't figure that out (since moderators here do not generally announce or give attribution of their actions), any moderator currently online (visible in the sidebar). I will not be posting any opinions about this policy publicly, though I do intend to raise a few matters privately with the moderators after this.

"..."

In any case, I want to thank @PDX_Pariah for finally getting an official statement out on the matter. It may not have been everything I hoped for, but it's better than silence, and indicates some progress is being made.

Edited for clarification of the ToS - Had a dad

Correct. Discussion of any ToS violations or Mod conversation is against the rules to help protect EVERYONE'S privacy. It may seem harsh or strict but it is definitely in place for a good and helpful reason.

You are quite welcome and hopefully we can mutually reach a point where we are all happy and satisfied, posthaste!

Something else on a separate but related note to this topic (honestly I should probably start a separate thread) that might be interesting is generally looser gender rules. From the Femminiello of southern Italy, to the Mukhannathun of Arabia, to the Hijra of India, there are several examples of people in the time period not conforming to the gender binary, and I think it might be interesting to implement or at least provide the tools to do so more easily.

Very interesting for sure, but for better visibility, posting elsewhere will get more attention and better results!

Technically more than 26 pages, since I think at least three to four pages of posts were deleted.

That is what happens when people cannot be civil and follow the rules.

I am just glad we are all back on the same topic and discussing openly without hostility again!

 

[PDX_Pariah]

Paradox:

Just focus on making a great game and not all of this noise. Sorry people from your company were treated poorly, just isn't cool. Hopefully this doesn't change the timelines of any of the DLC or patches coming down the pike, they should be the main priority.

The timeline has not changed in any way and certainly not because of this. We are still committed to bringing you the best and most inclusive content that we can at all time!

I'd call that at best a mischaracterization of most of the deleted posts, but since getting into a discussion about it would violate the rules, I'll leave it at that. I am, however, bringing up some concerns I have with the moderators and admins in PMs.

Certainly not ALL the posts were from people being uncivil, but a majority of them were.

Sadly, some good points were also lost due to the general clean-up of the thread, but that is part of the process. Don't worry... I can still see ALL of your comments... <.<

 

[blackninja9939]

I do hope that the promise of same sex marriage being moddable is kept. I hope this change isn't "forgotten"...

Seems it's still a while for the next patch, even more so how they mentioned now that they are having new members into the dev team. I wonder if they could release a patch before Royal Court (since it's been months since the last patch) and maybe this would be included in.

It has not been forgotten, it'll be in the 1.5 Royal Court patch (1.5 used to be called 1.4 before we did the Azure patch if you look through historical dev answers and get confused as to the numbers) as was stated before. And the concubine change was moved to being softcoded in 1.4 Azure already.

Nothing has been posted in this thread since then because there isn't really more to add, it is coming in 1.5 and until 1.5 is released not much to update y'all on.

It is not going to get a unique patch, that is not feasible for anything larger than a critical hotifx in general.
The process of releasing a patch is more than just pushing a button with a change in it. We've got to explicitly back track to a version of 1.4 and then to pull in all the variety of code and content changes made to support something as well as then test that specific version across multiple builds and distribution platforms, which when not already planned for is not great to try and retroactively do as all of that takes time.

 

[blackninja9939]

If this is confirmed, will you also unban WaffleIroner since from what I know (or more precisely from what others told me) he was banned because of his own mod/patch of this problem. Or maybe there was something else leading to this decision, at which point I want, or maybe even demand an explanation

I do not run the forums as a moderator or administrator so can not ban or unban people regardless, so not a question for me.
I would suspect it highly unlikely to be changed though, as Troy posted at the time, that user was banned because they violated the Terms of Service by releasing a modified version of the executable not because of the contents they say they changed in it. Here is what he said initially to explain why:

As for the removal of the “unofficial patch” around this change, any mod that directly modifies ck3.exe is strictly against our rules, and the ToS says as much. We simply cannot allow exe files to be distributed on our forum or any of our other community channels for a number of reasons, but primarily because they can’t be verified for security. There are bad actors out there and an unverified exe could have malware, datamining, keyloggers, or any number of ugly surprises, so regardless of what the content may actually be, they’re banned on sight. This has absolutely nothing to do with how any of us at Paradox feel about what a modder may have created or whether we agree with their intentions. No exe mods, period.

 

[blackninja9939]

Hopefully. It's the one-year anniversary of the game (in fact, the thirteen month mark, but evidently the dev team wants us to think of it as just a year), and the issue is in exactly the same place it was at launch, after more-or-less recovering from a backslide halfway through. I can understand how Covid slowed things down, but with reports of gender discrimination and general mistreatment coming out of the company, with the unions saying the complaints are valid, I can't help but think there's a lot of deeper problems at Paradox, and wonder if the low priority they've evidently been giving this issue is a symptom.

I hope they can get this sorted out for the benefit of everyone who's still playing, but it's probably too late for me -- they've lost me as a customer unless I hear of major reforms in the company and the unions give them the all clear.

Please stop trying to blame your dissatisfaction with our release timing of one feature on theory crafting utter nonsense to do with our work environment, its honestly quite insulting to try and tie these unrelated things together, we're the ones who are actually here so you'd think if you care that much about our work environment you'd be a bit compassionate to our workers.

A lot of our team is in our unions including multiple of our actual union representatives. Trying to tie this together belittles their hard work of doing these surveys and tries to paint our team as being anti-LBGT which couldn't be further from the truth of what we feel especially given that our team has plenty of LGBT+ people in it.

Like we've said already in this thread the feature will be released in 1.5 it is purely a matter of time. And as I explained before we cannot just excise certain features and try to retroactively make unplanned patches with them spliced in without adding further difficulty to the team.

You are free to not be happy with the time a release takes and even not play the game again by the time it does come out. But belittling the efforts of our union reps or trying to snidely make accusations about our team (again I might add as you've done this plenty) is not something we are going to sit here and accept.

[comment removed by admin for violating the forum rules]

And to comments like this you're just outing yourself to get moderators infracting you for such intolerant and un-inclusive behaviour, don't try to speak for us especially with such incorrect statements that go counter to what we've already said numerous times are our views.