Legalize Gay Modding!

[DogmaticApes]

You know Penguin Zero made me rethink my stance a little bit about this issue. While I still don't think Paradox is necessarily out to get anybody, it's possible some of you in this thread have had to fight throughout your lives just to be able love without persecution from awful people. Not to mention just being ignored in most media. The last thing you would want is the same behavior when you just want to relax and play a game. I have two LGBT siblings, one of which was thinking about getting CKIII until they found out about this issue. The more I think about it the more I see how valid it is to feel you no longer want to support paradox because it's not hard for a company to claim they support LGBT rights. Tons of them don't ever show it at all and most of the ones that do put in something extremely surface level or even just something that's implied. Yes you can have a secret lover, but some people have had to deal with keeping their relationships secret in real life. Why be forced to deal with that in a game. What is rare are companies that actually show their support and add it into their media. Yes this game is about being at least fairly close to actual history but not everyone wants the same experience from these games. Some people want to roleplay a ruler who wants to marry their same-sex lover and will create a new religion and topple empires to do so. That's the beauty of fiction, it can be whatever we want it to be. Sorry if that was a little ranty, point is I won't continue defending paradox as long as they continue to push you guys off to the side as less important than weighting music to change the chances of songs playing. (Yeah that was in the patch notes under modding.)

On this note I posted a mod idea above and was wondering where a good place to post it might be. I'm not a modder myself but I would like to increase the chances someone at least takes some inspiration from the idea.

 

[pengoyo]

Honestly, the more I think about this situation, the more irate I get about it. Maybe it's just because I'm getting old, or maybe it's exposure to the political climate of the past few years, but I find I have zero patience for this kind of social regression any more.

As others have said, Paradox has burned a lot of trust here. It took them six months from the launch of this thread to making any kind of formal recognition of it, aside from a vague hand-wavy 'we're aware of the issue' in a completely different thread that didn't commit them to anything. And even now, the formal recognition has said, basically, 'yeah, we'd like to do something about it, maybe, at some undefined point in the future. No promises. It's lower priority than a lot of other stuff. In the meantime, we've prevented you from doing even an approximation of it because it helps our bug reports.' That's just not acceptable to me these days.

To try to be a little more constructive, I thought I'd lay out what would be sufficient to get me back to playing the game and buying Paradox products. The bare minimum: remove the hardcoding on both same-sex concubinage and same-sex marriage, and issue a formal statement explaining why they felt it was necessary and what their plans are from here on the matter. Just going back to the status quo isn't enough for me any more, not after being burned this way. Once that's done, I'd evaluate the statement to see if I could reasonably support CK3 in the future, and definitely go back to buying DLC from other branches of the company (such as Stellaris: Nemesis).

What would guarantee my return: actually implementing same-sex marriage and concubinage in the game without need for mods. There have been multiple decent suggestions on how to do that in this thread already; I won't bother repeating them. As long as it was possible to somehow enable them in the game, be it by a game rule, a religious doctrine, a decision, or something else, I'd be satisfied.

Until something approximating the above happens, Paradox has lost me as a customer. I know one person is just a drop in the bucket, and I don't really have any illusions that anyone there is going to care about me doing this, but I have to do what I feel is right.

For me personally, I'm not at the level of not playing CK3, at least not yet. But I totally support anyone who feels that way. The removal of same-sex concubines has definitely dampened the appeal of the game for me.

Also I really do hope that same-sex marriage comes to vanilla CK3, as I think it fits well within the scope of custom religions (and personally I think there are multiple ways it could be made interesting from a dynastic point of view, even if it'll require a bit of ingenuity).

You know Penguin Zero made me rethink my stance a little bit about this issue. While I still don't think Paradox is necessarily out to get anybody, it's possible some of you in this thread have had to fight throughout your lives just to be able love without persecution from awful people. Not to mention just being ignored in most media. The last thing you would want is the same behavior when you just want to relax and play a game. I have two LGBT siblings, one of which was thinking about getting CKIII until they found out about this issue. The more I think about it the more I see how valid it is to feel you no longer want to support paradox because it's not hard for a company to claim they support LGBT rights. Tons of them don't ever show it at all and most of the ones that do put in something extremely surface level or even just something that's implied. Yes you can have a secret lover, but some people have had to deal with keeping their relationships secret in real life. Why be forced to deal with that in a game. What is rare are companies that actually show their support and add it into their media. Yes this game is about being at least fairly close to actual history but not everyone wants the same experience from these games. Some people want to roleplay a ruler who wants to marry their same-sex lover and will create a new religion and topple empires to do so. That's the beauty of fiction, it can be whatever we want it to be. Sorry if that was a little ranty, point is I won't continue defending paradox as long as they continue to push you guys off to the side as less important than weighting music to change the chances of songs playing. (Yeah that was in the patch notes under modding.)

For me personally, sometimes I want to role-play things "realistically". But more often than not, I just want to create a society where I feel like I could truly belong as a bit of escapist fantasy (along side whatever other goals I have for the play through). But that's hard with CK3 as it currently is. Just getting my mod to the point where two characters of the same-sex where on the character screen together was a delight to me, despite how low a bar that is. As this is no longer possible, the only thing that really draws me to CK3 is achievement hunting now, and I don't find that nearly as engaging.

On the topic of lovers. Personally, I find lovers very boring. You seduce or romance them once and then pretty much never hear from them again. It doesn't feel like an on going process or relationship. One thing that could make them more interesting would be if your lover somehow tried to help you from time to time, similar to how the wife does (could even have some risk of discovery if you do accept their help, for some more interest to the choice). For me, this is one reason why same-sex marriage is such a big goal, as then your same-sex partner would actually matter in the game.

On this note I posted a mod idea above and was wondering where a good place to post it might be. I'm not a modder myself but I would like to increase the chances someone at least takes some inspiration from the idea.

I once tried modding the game to have female characters use male models as a way to get "gay" marriage in game (definitely not the ideal way to do it, but I was trying anything to get same-sex marriage to work). But I couldn't get it to work at all. I mainly do script and some basic event modding (though I've been working on improving my skill in the later lately). Reworking the 3D graphics is currently outside my skill set. So unfortunately I don't think I can help.

You can try posting it as a suggestion to this 'user mods' sub-forum. It sounds like a really interesting idea, and I hope someone picks it up.

 

[Fabuloscriptor]

Until something approximating the above happens, Paradox has lost me as a customer. I know one person is just a drop in the bucket, and I don't really have any illusions that anyone there is going to care about me doing this, but I have to do what I feel is right.

I really do feel this way as well. It's honestly worse (and pretty typical) that they made a big to-do about how much more inclusive etc. CK3 was going to be. It happens every day - some or other company that's expressed profuse support for LGBTQ people completely fails to actually do anything about it, and/or does stuff that appears to contradict that sentiment. I fell for the marketing and bought the season pass when the game came out, which I now regret. I don't have a lot of goodwill left.

Sorry if that was a little ranty, point is I won't continue defending paradox as long as they continue to push you guys off to the side as less important than weighting music to change the chances of songs playing. (Yeah that was in the patch notes under modding.)

This really means a lot, and I'm sure it means a lot to your siblings as well. A lot of the time it feels like there's never going to be any movement with this kind of thing, because it's, what, less than 5% of the potential player base (and probably less, or at least less visible, given that a lot of LGBTQ people don't feel safe in gaming communities), so why would they bother to do anything about it when they could make 40% of people happy with something frivolous and uncontroversial instead? It's heartening to know that there are non-LGBTQ players who feel strongly enough to take a stance.

 

[Magil]

I agree with all the sentiments posted thus far (though I intend to keep modding and working on CK3 and playing occasionally myself, I can't blame anyone who feels otherwise). Even from a pure modding perspective, this really feels like a step backwards to me as well, as in CK2 gay concubines and marriages were possible to mod in--perhaps clunky (at least in the mods I used), but possible. So when CK3 comes around, and promises so much more, but hardcodes this, it's really disappointing. And it certainly doesn't feel great to be told we're on the backburner for this.

 

[Belph]

If they hadnt coded in a sexuality system, I wouldn't even care about this. But the fact that they created a system modelling sexuality, and the ability to reform religions with custom doctrines which is the perfect way to implement gay marriage/concubinage, and then not only didnt allow it to happen but BLOCKED any mod that could make it happen is such a baffling decision to me. Why bother modelling sexuality if you cant fully explore the system? Why not just keep things as they were in CK2? While I have many "possible" explanations I don't wish to disparage the developers so I won't share them here, it speaks to at the very least a deeply confused development. It is extremely disappointing that Paradox came so close yet landed so far away. As it is right now, homosexuality just exists as secret fodder. I sincerely hope Paradox plans on rectifying this, but as it is right now I have lost a fair amount of good will with them.

 

[Thomas_Oak]

Unfortunately in the vanilla game, homosexuality is used solely as a source for blackmail hooks. If you work at getting a faith with homosexuality accepted, then it becomes totally inactive as a game mechanic.

A bit like a film advertised as having a prominent gay character, but turns out once again to be the side-kick of the hero, who dies nobly protecting him so he can go off into the sunset and breed with the heroine.

With the removal of the ability to mod in gay concubines, they have neatly removed any avenues for these nasty gays to indulge in their sick fantasies.

 

[pengoyo]

Unfortunately in the vanilla game, homosexuality is used solely as a source for blackmail hooks. If you work at getting a faith with homosexuality accepted, then it becomes totally inactive as a game mechanic.

I totally agree with this assessment. I think it applies to pretty much all the crime doctrines (it's the reason I created my celebrate crimes mod).


But I have found one way to utilize homosexuality as a vanilla game mechanic outside of blackmail. If you have the game rule set to homosexuality, make a religion with polyamorous and homosexuality accepted (also marriage set to unrestricted will help too), then you can use seduction to keep all of your same-sex vassals happy (which if you have male-dominated or female-dominated will be most of them). Now admittedly this works better with bisexuality. But with homosexuality you do get the benefit that your spouse sleeping around doesn't produce any unrelated heirs, in case you're trying for reinforcing genetic traits.

I don't think this was something Paradox intended, as some of the event language around revealing multiple secret gay lovers doesn't seem to take into account this isn't scandalous for this custom religion. But it does make for some really stable realms.

edit: word

 

[DogmaticApes]

I've tried posting my mod idea as a new thread several times including rewriting it several different ways but the spam filter really seems to dislike me right now. Any idea how I'm supposed to contact an admin to get this fixed?

Edit: Never mind it magically decided to work after periodically trying to post it for several hours


Here is the thread for those of you who are interested

 

[Thomas_Oak]

If this consort problem was caused by a mistake, then the obvious and natural thing to do would be to go onto a forum such as this, offer a sincere apology, and state that they will try their best to put it right as soon as possible.
Instant PR success and this portion of the community will love them even more.
Even a statement saying they have no intention of correcting it would be better than nothing, but to be met with a wall of silence just feeds the resentment.

 

[pevergreen]

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.

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.

Just making these clear, front and centre.

This is video game modding question, not a thread to discuss the complexities of what real life was back then, across varied cultures and religions.

 

[pevergreen]

I've tried posting my mod idea as a new thread several times including rewriting it several different ways but the spam filter really seems to dislike me right now. Any idea how I'm supposed to contact an admin to get this fixed?

Edit: Never mind it magically decided to work after periodically trying to post it for several hours


Here is the thread for those of you who are interested

Just so you're aware, that's an automated thing preventing newer accounts (time and post limits) from posting links. It's an anti spambot thing

 

[pevergreen]

If this consort problem was caused by a mistake, then the obvious and natural thing to do would be to go onto a forum such as this, offer a sincere apology, and state that they will try their best to put it right as soon as possible.
Instant PR success and this portion of the community will love them even more.
Even a statement saying they have no intention of correcting it would be better than nothing, but to be met with a wall of silence just feeds the resentment.

I would encourage you to view the thread in "show only dev responses" and see what blackninja has been saying.

 

[klopkr]

The hardest thing for me when it comes to this is the fact that it's making me unable to play lgbt relationships in mods where lgbt relationships are normal, canon, or reasonable or at best force it to do it in a hacky way.

Elder Scrolls, Avatar, She-Ra, After the End etc. These are scenarios that'll just inherently be straightwashed if modded into the game.

But even in the base game there's literal 'LGBT' themed rules that just slap me in the face because why make being gay accepted in game if I can't even get gay married and now lose the only flavour for it (persecution).

It's not when it's easy that it matters to be an ally it's when it's hard. Why even pay us lip service if the things that matter are hardcoded?

Anyways I trust they'll fix this eventually. But if this happens again in CK4 I'm gonna have to seriously reconsider if paradox is just meaninglessly pandering to me.

 

[Lineana]

I want to reclaim my positive view on the topic and the crusader 3 devs.

So I will run down the facts and what might be positive about it, not spilling the bean on the mistakes that have been made.

First we are not really talking about modding support. It revolves more around the future of the game and the community. It includes the way people/fans are treated, the communication, the changes made to the game, the freedom of choice how to have fun playing the game and mostly the future of the game and all topics mentioned above.

Also we are not talking about minor changes of someone that does not know what they are doing.
As modders we look into the code, at least the public part but that gives away quiet some information.
Its pretty clear that initially the marriage and concubinage was implemented the way it was in CK2. This was working fine in both games, same-sex concubinage mods did show that the game has no issue with gender, there was sufficient error handling for all chases to not cause any bugs. For example, males cannot get pregnant and females can not impregnate someone. The pronounce, the ui the event handlers everything was cut out to take it flexible and handle every possible input without issues.
Then this was changed towards the release for marriage but not for concubines. With the 1.3 patch we saw a massiv rework of the whole marriage, concubinage and other relation relevant systems. We are talking about 1000s of lines of code that have been completely redone. What we can see here is that most of the error handling especially about things not in line with a standard marriage have been removed. Instead it is now handled by an intern prevent mechanic that will simple refuse to handle anything but the standard marriage and concubines. It does not really have anything to do with error handling since instead of proper errors the game will now just return null if the input differs from a standard marriage/concubinage.

Blackninja9939 comment caused some irritation so I want to give a neutral view on it.
He said he is here on his free time so we should not assume him as official representative and take his statements as a fellow person joining this discussion and not as official announcements.
He said he is not involved with the marriage events and doesn’t know whats going on there. Joining in with the dev tag at the worst possible time when 1.3 just made everything worse basically put him into a bad spot where you cant really say anything that is not wrong. We shouldn’t put so much weight into it.
He said he is just here to let us know that they care and I truly believe him that most if not all of the team do honestly care. Unfortunately he was dragged into some arguments and no offense I think he made assumptions that are not entirely true.
For example that someone made a little change for error handling not knowing it would lock modders out and prevent same sex concubinage in the future. While there actually was a major rework of everything revolved around how marriage and concubines are handled that was clearly made by someone that knows what they are doing.
Or the assumption that it is not of high priority, which is true for mod support but might not be true for the topic and the whole marriage mechanic itself.

So what happened in the eyes of the community was,
CK2 and the brand and studio (paradox) have made a name to offering freedom to the players including all ways of lifestyles and not applying restrictions wherever possible.
Then CK3 released and after being happy for the allow homosexuality switch, people came to realize that the possibility to have official same sex relations like marriage or concubinage was not part of the game. Then it was realized that there is a mechanic that does one thing, prevent modders from adding same sex marriage. Then the patch 1.3 solidified this ban and extended it onto concubinage to prevent this as well. Then a dev comment stated it is not a priority and it is not worked on. Suggesting that its probably just someone that does not know what they are doing that took this away from them.

Thus it is understandable that people are upset. This ranges farther than just the 5% of population. Among CK3 players its likely more than 5% but everyone that can differ between good and bad will be put of by how this is handled. The information that get visible, the communication with the players and the information that where not given and held back created an incredible bad image of Paradox. While other stuff is not to blame this one is, one is responsible as to how one is perceived and paradox did make themselves look really bad here.


Enough of what happened in the past now to the positive part. Even thou mistakes where made which is just human, they are good people with good intentions and great talent. I don’t fear to be disappointed with the future of CK3.

Lets see into the future and what this we are experiencing now could mean.
Please note this is pure speculation and must not be true and a bad development cannot be ruled out, but assuming good will I think it’s plausible.

So what would be a positive explanation for the things that happened so far?
First they implemented marriage and concubinage as an open and moddable system like in ck2. Then they changed it into a locked intern system hastily and in the last minutes it seems.
This is not complete they are still putting a lot of work into it so its bound to change more and we cant see where its heading.
Its inarguable that preventing modders preemptively from modding marriage and concubinage before the reasons for it can be shared was a way to send a really bad message. But why would on do it in the first place.
My guess would be the only reason you prevent modders from entering a mechanic that did work just fine with mod support is if you think it will not be necessary. Meaning that you plan to add all and every possibility into the core game so modding it is no longer needed.
This groundbreaking rework of the way marriage and concubinage is handled could mean they are actively working to add a proper system to handle gay marriage/concubinage and gameplay with high quality. This would include some or all things like the marriage and concubines of course but also who is by your side (soulmate), lifestyle and living in general, events, adoption, passing on titles or enacting heirs, reactions and religious handlers and so on. It also might handle other forms of relations.


My suggestion would be for paradox to give this a higher priority, not the modding support but the communication with the fans and the whole matter. I do believe it already is a top priority on the dev side and it would be best to feature the plans as soon as possible in the dev diary to avoid further damage and hardship and make a lot of people happy. Or at least officially acknowledge that the marriage system is a high priority.


Can’t wait to see what you will come up with. I do believe in you devs, but try to give some words in the future if good things are received bad.

 

[DogmaticApes]

I agree with the statement here. I think it might help things a bit if there was an official statement from paradox.

 

[Thomas_Oak]

I see there is already an article in PC Gamer magazine about this issue. I doubt very much if I am allowed to post the link to it.

 

[pevergreen]

I see there is already an article in PC Gamer magazine about this issue. I doubt very much if I am allowed to post the link to it.

There is nothing in the rules preventing you from posting a link to an article about this game, especially if it is about this issue.

The closest rule would be:

Posts or messages with the incentive to sell, buy, or trade products or services, links to auctions, affiliate links, links to promote personal or commercial websites, blogs, personal social media channels and other forums is not allowed without the permission of Paradox.

But assuming you aren't trying to promote PC Gamer, but are instead wanting to talk about it - it's fine.

 

[Karlington]

Due to the rampant censorship on these forums in discussing this issue, I would recommend people take it to the Steam reviews. Let the world know what Pdox is doing.

This thread has 24 pages. It doesn't seem very heavily censored?

 

[Penguin Zero]

I've just put up a review on Steam explaining my current issues with the game and why I can't recommend or support it. I leaned a little more towards the effects this will have on the modding community than the LGBT community (the whole concept that Paradox feels free to break your mods with no warning or explanation simply because it makes things a little easier on them internally), since I suspect the Steam community will be a little more sympathetic to that, and to be fair it's another reason to be concerned about this whole issue. But I didn't shy away from mentioning how it affects the LGBTQ community, too.

Not expecting it's going to get a lot of positive response anyway, but I felt it had to be done.

 

[klopkr]

I see there is already an article in PC Gamer magazine about this issue. I doubt very much if I am allowed to post the link to it.

Please link it. I'd like to read it.