1) Your name
Cedric Tan
2) Where are you based?
In London, United Kingdom but I was raised in Australia.
3) What you would like to share about your family and job?
I am from a family of five, originally Malaysian Chinese but we migrated to Australia when I was 3 years old. I grew up in Australia until I was 13 then I was educated in the United Kingdom and am now finishing my university degree at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Currently I also have the pleasure of working as a Social Media Manager for Esports One. We are a platform for fantasy esports focused primarily on League of Legends and have been trying to cover as many regions as possible. I am really fortunate to just be able to interact with people like Perkz on a daily basis!
4) Any Pets and info on them.
No pets! Had a few dogs when I was growing up in Australia but now, living alone in the UK, I do not have the opportunity. My sister has a very cute Norwegian Elkhound but she lives in New Jersey, USA.
5) How did you start watching/playing LOL?
I started when I was around 12 years old. I was introduced to it through a friend that I was playing Dota 2 with. At that time, Australia had no dedicated server which meant that you had to play on the US servers. I remember struggling to learn the game with 300 ping which meant all of your reactionary capabilities would be thrown out of the window. From there, I played with friends after school most days for fun. It was just a good way to get in touch with your mates online after seeing them during the day.
When the dedicated servers for Oceania came, we had much better ping and that meant I had a go at ranked. I was not very good at all and placed bronze and worked incredibly hard to get to silver when I was around 12 years old. The challenge getting there, by playing Kassadin which I saw a guide for, proved to be an oddly rewarding experience. Those memories stuck with me and I continued to play casually.
Naturally, wanting to get a bit better at the game meant watching many YouTube videos online about positioning, how the Pro Players do x, y or z and as a result, I found competitive League of Legends extremely exciting to watch and learn from. Usually, it was me watching by myself but I remembered the nascent days of the LCS and the initial Worlds competitions that involved a 1 million dollar prize pool which, to me, was simply unfathomable.
6) What LOL community means to you?
League of Legends proved to be an awesome foundation to make friends with, especially when heading into boarding school in a country across the world. Funnily enough, one of the first things I asked my boarding mates was whether or not they played League of Legends. I was happy to see that a few of them did and that helped me ease into boarding life a bit better. My friends and I also managed to convince a few others to join in on the fun and soon we had a decent 5-man team going after homework was finished, playing until the housemaster would come and berate us to study more! Good times. In that sense, the community we created within our own group of players meant that we could cultivate a shared interest and help one another improve.
Transitioning to university, I found that my university had a gaming society with a lot of members interested in League of Legends as well. We had watch parties for Worlds events and we managed to bond over these due to our common interests. At the university level there is also competition which I sometimes took part in, the community was focused on competition and trying to place as high as possible but the real kick was just being able to play with your friends once a week. Through these experiences I was really able to find my own community within university ultimately pushing me to become president of the society in my final year.
From an earlier point, my passion for watching the scene grew as I remember seeing the Taipei Assassins beat Azubu Frost in 2012 then watching SKT with Faker take the world by storm in 2013. I got to understand the community a bit better then, seeing teams become companies, such as Cloud 9 and TSM, as well as pro-players transitioning into more managerial roles and growing their brand such as Carlo ‘ocelote’ Rodriguez and G2 Esports.
I found it fascinating and realised how powerful the community was because they supported all of these developments. Sure, Riot Games played a large part in constructing leagues to facilitate better viewership and so on, but my belief is that the LoL community has done an amazing job of involving others through word of mouth so that people really get involved with the scene more. This just continued to grow and I’ve made a lot of great friends.
So ultimately what the LoL community means to me is a place where like-minded individuals can work together to improve whilst enjoying one another’s company. That’s not to say you’ll always have good days, toxicity and rude players can be persistent issues but I’d think finding a group to play with helps to dampen these issues a bit, allowing you to enjoy the game a bit more.
7) What are your other passions? What do you like doing with your time?
For myself, I love playing computer games and outside of League of Legends, I am an avid World of Warcraft player as well as a casual Valorant player. I used to play a lot of Overwatch, another first-person shooter, but did not have as much time to commit to the game in my final year of study in university.
Outside of the computer, I play(ed) Ultimate Frisbee for my university’s team, cook a lot of food (on my food Instagram!) and spend time watching a tonne of Netflix, especially Korean Drama. I am learning Korean at the moment, as a result of my drama interests, as well.
I do have to say though that esports and gaming constitute a large part of my life and without it, I feel like I would have been thrown in a completely different trajectory. It’s just been an absolutely wonderful experience to make friends the way I have done with so many brilliant, kind, funny and skilled people.
I hope those who game can experience the same things I have!
Thank you so much for all our interactions Cedric, both personally and through Esports One! It has been so much fun! Lots of love LeicesterLadyPerkz xxx
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