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I found the article by searching for it: https://www.pcgamer.com/crusader-kings-3-accidentally-breaks-same-sex-concubine-mods/

There's also one up at Rock Paper Shotgun: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/crusader-kings-3s-latest-update-blocks-same-sex-relationship-mods

The RPS article also has a quote from an email response Paradox gave to them, which doesn't seem very satisfying. It cites the changes made in 1.3 to have made same-sex relationships 'difficult to mod in without breaking a lot of stuff.' Shouldn't that be the sort of thing modders have to worry about, not the devs? If a mod breaks something, the modder will either go in and fix it, or accept a buggy mod. It doesn't reflect on the dev team at all. But if we accept they're being entirely forthright and honest there (which is still up in the air for me), then they're basically playing gatekeeper on what kind of mods we can even try to make out of a sort of exaggerated concern for... what? Our 'safety,' maybe? Not wanting us to suffer the disappointment of bad mods? It's a very insufficient reason, if you ask me.

There have been times when modders have shown great ingenuity in working around limitations and problems that the devs thought were insurmountable, or at least would take too much time. I don't know if that would be the case here, but I'm definitely not satisfied with the devs preemptively not even giving us the chance. Especially on such a significant issue as this.
 
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I found the article by searching for it: https://www.pcgamer.com/crusader-kings-3-accidentally-breaks-same-sex-concubine-mods/

There's also one up at Rock Paper Shotgun: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/crusader-kings-3s-latest-update-blocks-same-sex-relationship-mods

The RPS article also has a quote from an email response Paradox gave to them, which doesn't seem very satisfying. It cites the changes made in 1.3 to have made same-sex relationships 'difficult to mod in without breaking a lot of stuff.' Shouldn't that be the sort of thing modders have to worry about, not the devs? If a mod breaks something, the modder will either go in and fix it, or accept a buggy mod. It doesn't reflect on the dev team at all. But if we accept they're being entirely forthright and honest there (which is still up in the air for me), then they're basically playing gatekeeper on what kind of mods we can even try to make out of a sort of exaggerated concern for... what? Our 'safety,' maybe? Not wanting us to suffer the disappointment of bad mods? It's a very insufficient reason, if you ask me.

There have been times when modders have shown great ingenuity in working around limitations and problems that the devs thought were insurmountable, or at least would take too much time. I don't know if that would be the case here, but I'm definitely not satisfied with the devs preemptively not even giving us the chance. Especially on such a significant issue as this.
I think it's good that articles like this are getting out there, it might result in some pressure being put on the dev team to address the issue, since they don't seem inclined to do it on their own. Maybe I'm just being too optimistic, but the RPS article almost made it sound to me like the "higher-ups" are taking notice of this issue that they probably were not aware of up to this point, which may result in change sooner than later. That's just me maybe reading too much into it though, so grain of salt.
 
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There is a decent chance that removing checks on set_mother, set_father, and make_pregnant, could break something in the game's inheritance system when gendered inheritance laws are applied. If the developers would like to make a show of good-faith, removing the blocks in those first two commands could be a good start (potentially with the syntax I suggest on page 2 if additional safety is desired).

Oh definitely inheritance will be broken, at least concerning dynastic inheritance line, for instance you can do this in ck2 and when you do, if you have a lesbian marriage and you set yourself to be impregnated and its not matrilineal marriage the child will be of your wife dynasty. This can be semi avoided by having the child out side of marriage and you can legitimize him. Still it's not really a problem and there are mods that allow dynasty changing so you can mitigate this behavior.
 
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Anything less than that, and I'm gone for good.

100%. I've been a loyal customer for almost a decade. I've spent probably upwards of a thousand dollars on Paradox games and thousands of hours of my life playing them. I was delighted when the PR around CK3 drew explicit attention to issues of representation, because Paradox has often been quite badly behind the curve in this regard. Here is some advice: if you want to represent a group of people better, you should listen to what they say about the way they're being represented. I do not feel listened to, and I do not feel that the LGBTQ people in this thread are being listened to. I feel like we are being treated like a noisy problem that ought to go away, implicitly threatened with the revocation of services we've paid for if we refuse to go away, and otherwise belittled and ignored. We are not children to be chastised for being dissatisfied with what we're given; we're paying customers who you claim to be interested in doing better by.

Look to the left. Look at those badges and think about the investment they represent. That is a fraction of what I have actually invested: I've made and contributed to mods that have been downloaded thousands of times and featured in the free promotion provided by YouTubers and influencers. I would be gladly willing to give that again ten times over, because I love these games, I love playing them, I love creating with them. This experience has totally soured my commercial relationship with Paradox. I'm left feeling insulted, unvalued and disinclined to do anything but warn others about what they can expect.
 
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Everyone is here trying to vilify Paradox for something that wasn't malicious. Paradox took down a mod that violated their terms of service, ok. They do that all of the time. People here are claiming that it's an example of their homophobia, but CK3 has a far better depiction of homosexuality than CK2 does! If they had been homophobic, they wouldn't have bothered adding anything for it.

People, get it through your heads. This is not a targeted attack. Paradox takes down mods all of the time for violating their terms of service. They weren't just going to keep a mod because it adds gay marriage. They take down beneficial mods alongside the negative mods. WaffleIron specifically talked to Paradox on the CK3 Mod Coop discord. Even he understands that it's a normal thing to take down mods. Stop claiming that this is targeted, it is not.

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Even the maker of the mod understands that this is an overreaction on the community's part.
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A dev has publicly talked to him and nothing ill has happened. PDX aren't the bad guys here. The bad guys are the people sending them hatemail.
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I'll be honest, when I posted about the patches deletion I cared less about the link itself going down, and was more concerned with the deletion of all the discussion *around* the patch. The fact that a user was able to modify out the hard blocks on the features we were asking for without the game shattering is something that is an important development in this conversation and something that puts a dent in Paradox's traditional arguments for why it hasn't been implemented. The posts mentioning it should have been left up.
 
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> Did you intercept the communication between paradox and WaffleIroner?

Uhhh well a discussion between Waffleironer and Blackninja on the CK3 Mod Coop yes - was publicly in chat
Oh great, since everybody should have been on discord 24/7 now, I was wrong.
I guess I have to dump all PUBLIC CHATs regarding this issue here cuz they won't try to communicate us anymore.

blackninjaToday at 1:09 AM

It is definitely not
Against our terms of service quite explicitly at least
Also annoyingly makes it out as if we're not doing this cause we're arseholes and trying to make it out like we're lying about the fact there are difficulties in it as opposed to the fact that patching to ignoring asserts and then not testing it is equal to difficulty free Despite what we say people seem to love to assume the worst possible intentions of this

blackninjaToday at 1:22 AM

At least to me the tone of all these threads goes to make it look like we're intentionally being arses here, just binary patching out asserts or checks is not even remotely the same as actually supported bug free systems But I'm giving up with trying to make people not misrepresent that idea, we answered threads and even had a PR comment in an article about it and people will still accuse our team with LBGT people of being homophobic anyway

blackninjaToday at 1:26 AM

I mean I can see on the forums its already been reported to moderation, I'm not going to delete it since moderators get salty when devs do it, but it definitely should be taken down since allowing distributing arbitrary exe patches on our own forums is incredibly risky Even though its patching in a good thing, that is a precedent that should not be set

blackninjaToday at 1:27 AM

Of course it is a sensitive issue to people, binary patching to dunk on the devs to try show that we're just being lazy, or worse implications people will take, in not doing though is not exactly going to make people take a less harsh tone in these threads Oh well, I've resigned myself to receiving messages from people accusing me of being a homophobe at this point no matter how much it vexes me

blackninjaToday at 1:32 AM

I'm not annoyed at you Waffleiron for doing this, though you probably should have known that exe patch distribution will result in it being taken down, its just that I can already envision the joyous responses and messages I am going to receive now since I tried to be open in our communication on this topic and therefore pin the tail on the developer to blame is going to land on me despite me not actually having done anything
Though I should probably be used to that sort of thing from the internet by now
WaffleIron — Yesterday at 8:46 PM
My gay marriage patch already seems to have gotten me forum banned. Unfortunately I can't even tell people not to over-react, because I cannot post.
Yikkkes. You guys have heard. Stop over-reacting and STOP sending hate mails to anyone. Don't act like homophobes sending random hate massages to people. Also, next time, a short comment from moderator would have been very appreiciated and prevented any shit stroms.
 
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So a bunch of posts just vanish and the only place this is explained is in an unofficial Discord that has nothing to do with Paradox except that some people who work for them post there, and that explanation doesn't begin to explain why it was necessary to ban WaffleIroner or delete the entire discussion of the topic, and now we're meant to say, "You're right, they're saints, this isn't another in a long series of insults!"

Give me a break.
What is the point of this forum now at this point? Clearly you have to be in their discord circlejerk to be informed from dev team and make fun of people.

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Was it right to ban him? Maybe not, maybe a warning would have been sufficient, but that .exe wasn't staying on this forum, and all links to it would have been deleted.
 
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So a bunch of posts just vanish and the only place this is explained is in an unofficial Discord that has nothing to do with Paradox except that some people who work for them post there, and that explanation doesn't begin to explain why it was necessary to ban WaffleIroner or delete the entire discussion of the topic, and now we're meant to say, "You're right, they're saints, this isn't another in a long series of insults!"

Give me a break.

And its only the fact it occured in that discord if you either join the discord OR look at the PDF i posted was....someone posting the forum link to his post, and a bunch of modders discussing if that was even allowed,

To which BlackNinja chimed in that no, editing and distribution of CK3 .exe files was not allowed, to which Waffle WAS ALSO in the discord to which the pair started talking to eachother.
 
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I'll just add, after rereading some of this, that if the devs have been getting hate mail or the like, I obviously don't condone it. I respect them for the work they do, and I don't think that they personally are bad people or actively homophobic or anything of the sort. And hate mail in general is an awful thing that is both morally wrong and not at all productive. I want an open, frank, and earnest discussion of the matter, and that's hard to do when the devs are feeling attacked.

That said, I don't like the fact that they seem more open to discussing this matter in Discords filled with people who don't seem to care about the issue, instead of the thread where people actually concerned about the issue are gathered. It gives the unpleasant impression that they're more interested in getting reinforcement and comfort from people who already support them, instead of actually trying to justify their actions.

(Of course, I'd like an official statement giving their plans when it comes to LGBTQ issues in the game, and a road map going forward, more than either. We'll see if we get it.)
 
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If you claim to want to support this, the appropriate course of action would be to offer constructive input concerning what is and is not an appropriate way or forum for modders to attempt to fix this for ourselves. An inappropriate course of action would be to have a sniper on the roof taking out everyone who tries anything and otherwise entirely eschewing interaction like you're afraid you'll catch plague.

People from that Discord server: now that there are screenshots here of you mocking us, I think you might want to try a little harder to demonstrate your good faith. Right now it just looks like you're angry about us being allowed to speak.
 
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It's almost like nobody has any initiative to communicate if browsing the forum is just a constant bombardment of vitriol, whereas a discord could serve as a safe space to have civilized discussions.

Y'all should try it some time.

Once upon a time there were a bunch of toxic asshats in the discord too, and they drove away Paradox the first time around. Now that the toxicity is gone, they've resumed communications. We greatly appreciate it, since it means we're getting insight into the development pipeline and the ears of the programmers who can give us the features we need to keep producing great TCs.
 
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Dear goodness, a lot of posts have been deleted, as they violate the ToS. There is no conspiracy here, it's play nice or don't play. Part of playing nice is following the forum rules.

If you have questions it's easy to see what moderator is online, just PM them and they will get back to you. The thread will remain closed till Tuesday when Pdx is back in the office.

For the nth time posts do not go missing because of criticism, they do however go missing when they violate the forum rules.

As an FYI, it is strictly forbidden to distribute the exe of any game.
 
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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!
 
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Glad to hear!

Now that the thread's restored and with my previous post deleted, I'd just like to reiterate the server (the aformentioned CKIII Modding Coop) is a public server of thousands of modders and modding fans. It's entirely open to the public and has never been kept private, though we have only just started trying to branch out our reach to the forums. Everyone is free to join it with this link and we make no distinction on users being from the forum or the Workshop or ModDB or wherever they choose to post their mods and discuss things.

We have a good relationship with Paradox because we represent essentially every major mod and (in my opinion, which I proud myself on) are generally the cutting edge of modding. We've produced the first artifact, coronation, and society modules, and effectively every major total conversion mod is centered there. Thanks to this, and the friendliness of several CK3 team members who like to visit and help us on our projects, we've managed to create a relationship with PDX where we collectively request new modding features through a common Trello (you can check more about that here) and work to expand moddability for everyone.

It's not a private circlejerk or secret server for a few people to complain with PDX employees in. We have a general discussion which is where those screenshots were taken, and while reps were admonished for publicly complaining about individuals, it was in no way an official action on behalf of the Coop and the server is focused on modding. It's fairly anti-drama, and as I said, everyone is invited to visit and join us.

Just wanted to clear that up, since the Coop is inclusive and I don't want the forums to think they're not invited to come party.
 
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