Leak Claims Tencent Is Adding 'Master Love' Romance Mechanics to Honor of Kings — NGA Roasts It: 'Source Is a Tieba Throwaway Account, Every Waifu Already Has a Canon Boyfriend'

When 'ML' (Master Love — gacha jargon for characters being one-sidedly romantically devoted to the player) became the hottest buzzword in the Chinese mobile gaming scene, someone finally tried to drag it into the territory of the country's biggest mobile game: Honor of Kings (王者荣耀). A mysterious screenshot surfaced, claiming Tencent was about to implement ML mechanics in HoK. But rather than excitement, the NGA community's first reaction was more like — 'You can't be serious.'

Instead of eating the drama, NGA users went straight into fact-checking mode. A commenter on floor 15 pointed out that the so-called 'leak' came from a green-tier Tieba account — that's Tieba-speak for a freshly registered throwaway with zero credibility. The post even name-dropped Ma Huateng (Pony Ma, Tencent's CEO) as being personally involved, because the faker apparently didn't know how Tencent's internal org structure works and assumed Ma directly runs game operations. The fabrication was so sloppy that one user quipped, 'Screenshots of the next wave of gullible NGA sheep believing this are already being prepared.'

But the real death blow to this rumor came from the game's own lore. One user posed the killer question: 'Let's pretend this is real for a second — which female character in HoK doesn't already have a canon love interest that you could turn into an ML route?' After running through the roster, the answer was basically: none. Someone suggested Daji (妲己), the game's iconic mascot character, whose voiceline 'Master's orders are absolute' sounds very ML-coded. But that was immediately shot down — in HoK's early lore, Daji's 'master' was King Zhou (纣王, from the classic novel Fengshen Yanyi), and the game's original Baron Nashor-style boss was literally modeled after him. The player was never part of that equation. As for Hai Yue (海月), another candidate, her backstory as a religious zealot with her own life and agenda made her equally unfit for ML duty.

One commenter did drop an amusing piece of gaming archaeology. Floor 5 recalled that Ma Huateng himself once claimed he used to personally chat with users on QQ back in the day, doing something vaguely similar to character-player interaction — 'back when ML wasn't even a concept yet.' The authenticity is anyone's guess, but it added a layer of absurdist historical flavor to the whole mess.

Not everyone was there for the memes, though. A more measured take on floor 18 suggested the rumor might be a garbled version of actual plans for Honor of Kings: World, the upcoming open-world spinoff, rather than anything being shoehorned into the existing MOBA. After all, trying to inject dating-sim mechanics into a competitive PvP game carries the same energy as adding romance routes to Call of Duty — which is exactly the vibe that left the floor 13 commenter bewildered: 'CF... ML...? Am I the one out of touch?'

As of now, there's been zero official response, and no credible corroborating evidence has surfaced. The NGA consensus is firmly in 'entertainment only' territory — if Tencent really wants to do ML, maybe start by untangling Daji's millennia-old relationship with King Zhou first.