So first, let’s look back to see the roots. When I first started Onyx Path, I worked with a lot of the same people I had a relationship with from my White Wolf days. The philosophy I had was to trust the developers I had already worked with and continue with the same general process structure as we’d been using since the WW days. I gave the devs a lot of leeway to manage their own contracts, submit pay schedules, and do the business odds and ends because they already knew how to do it and were the ones talking with their writers anyway — which worked great in the beginning.

As we continued to evolve and add more freelancers and games, I realized that our process needed to change for a couple of reasons. First, our developers were not in-house. They often do more than one project and work with multiple freelancers on a contractual basis. Most of them have full-or-part time jobs in addition to working with us. Even though they had all the info to fill out the contracts, those contracts do take time to pull together, and added more to their plate.

Second, because managing contracts proved to be a lot of work, it was very easy and natural for mistakes to happen. When errors did occur, the plan was that the devs would try and fix them, or bump the problem to me. We dealt with them on a case-by-case basis and continued to encourage freelancers to contact us if they had issues. And even then, sometimes, the dev told me about an issue and I’d be the one bobbling the ball on the fix.

Which is why the solution had to be to evolve the process; and to do that, we needed an company infrastructure that could adopt and adapt to us improving our processes. Which meant we needed Rollickin’ Rose to advocate for the developers and writers and editors and field concerns and questions, we needed LisaT to build new payment systems and to do the same with writing the contracts and getting them out and signed so that the devs no longer had to, and Mighty Matt McElroy to handle comp copies.

So, I say again, if you have freelanced for us and have an issue with payment, contracts, or anything else, the best way to get your problem resolved is to email us directly. If we do not receive an email, we can’t follow up with you to get your issues sorted.