Zie 🇨🇦 · @Mack_Maring
30th Jul 2017 from TwitLonger
A statement about "not paying our (Overwatch) players"
In our 13 months of life, Northern Gaming has been home to over 50 unique players, managers, coaches, and staff members that we have been responsible for paying and taking care of.
Of those people, a very small handful of players (3-5) have spread misinformation that we do not pay our players. The others have been content, four of which we have continued to support since our inception; the rest we have over time ceased working with but have professional relationships with.
This post will in no way name or shame anyone, as our only intentions are to clear up the misinformation that has been spread and perpetuated specifically in the Overwatch community of /r/competitiveoverwatch --- our attempts as an organization to clear these rumors up led to our Owner being permanently banned from the sub-Reddit, and despite his attempts to clear up the issues through PM's with mods he was met with weeks of being ignored and the prejudice of the rumors rendered him guilty in their minds without any attempts to look at the situation.
The players at the time wanted to play under the Tempo Storm banner, and an agreement could not be made between NG and Tempo Storm for a transfer; as such a deal was unlikely and we offered the players an alternative as their contracts were up for renegotiation in a little over a month.
We informed the players that we could either look to transfer their contracts to another organization and pay them as per our contract, or if they were willing to sacrifice the months pay, that we would release them from their contracts immediately so that they would be free to sign to whichever organization they wanted. The players in question wanted to both be paid, and released immediately, which was not an option as we were under no obligation to release them, and financially it made no sense for us.
After a couple of days, the players informed us that they would rather be released early to choose their own destiny, and as such we released them from their contracts so that they would be able to negotiate a new deal with whichever organization they felt most comfortable. From this point, rumors were started by several of the players stating that they were not paid for their time under Northern Gaming, which was unequivocally false. To this day, we have not and will not release the financial documents as it would require us to disclose sensitive information about the players in question. Instead, we've done our best to quell the rumors without name and shaming anyone in particular.
The biggest thing that we have said in our attempts to do that, is that had our players ever felt that they were wronged, they had every right to come after us for the money owed as per their contracts. Many people questioned how the players would ever afford legal fees, but as per our agreement with them, the players would have been entitled to having their legal fees covered had we been guilty of not paying them. With great people in the space like Bryce Blum and Ryan Morrison, the players had ample opportunity to get what they felt they were owed, had they actually been owed anything.
http://imgur.com/ttBAB8g - an image taken directly from our at the time contracts with the players at the time.
A few months ago, we had spoken briefly with Richard Lewis, citing our interest to speak with him regarding the situation so that we could hopefully have someone reputable see the entire situation, and help us clear our image. Upon the revelation that a conversation would possibly take place between Mr. Lewis and our CEO, one of our former players management group reached out to our CEO and informed him to not speak to Mr. Lewis until their legal team had ample chance to review our previous contract with the player in question.
After a brief conversation, the management group informed our CEO that they would be looking into the claims that we owed the player and would be suing us if it was found that we did infact owe the player. Several days later, upon reviewing the contract, and knowing that we would owe them legal fees had we been found guilty of not paying our players, he informed our CEO that they would not be seeking legal action.
http://imgur.com/B87pNdb - The original threat of legal action - Date included.
http://imgur.com/HSceaqU - The final message between the parties; stating that there would be no legal action - Date included.
This is the last time we will bring this up or speak to it. Hopefully, these images can help show that even with the ability to do so, the management of our former players elected not to pursue damages/"owed" salary --- after threatening to do so had they found us to owe their client money. Although we always felt that the fact we still had players who have stayed with us for over a year was a testament to the fact that we pay our players, every once in a while we still get the accusations of being scummy and not paying our players. There is no way for us to further prove we paid them without risking leaking sensitive information, which we will never do.
We don't want people who are new to our fanbase to stumble across a baseless rumor perpetuated by a small community to affect their perception of our brand. Especially given how we are working towards affiliation with a sports franchise.
We hope that this helps paint the whole picture, thank you for your constant support through these times, we appreciate all of our fans dearly.