Honor of Kings Fans Vote for Their Favorite Hero, and a Dark Horse Leads
Honor of Kings, the mobile battle arena game that tens of millions of people in China play every day, is warming up for its tenth anniversary celebrations. As part of the buildup, the game’s publisher Tencent has teamed up with the video platform Bilibili to run a fan vote for the most popular hero of the year. The poll is not held inside the game itself, but the numbers still say something about which characters players actually care about.
The vote has only been open for two days, yet the gap between the frontrunners and everyone else is already enormous. Li Xin sits at the top with close to 300,000 votes. For comparison, another popular pick, Jin Chan, had only a little over a thousand votes at the same point. That is not a small lead; it is a landslide in the making.
Li Xin is not a newcomer. The character has long been a favorite because he can switch between two distinct fighting styles. Players can build him as “Light Xin,” a ranged attacker who strikes from a distance, or “Dark Xin,” a melee bruiser who dives into the middle of a fight. That flexibility means two very different kinds of players can both call him their main, which helps explain the surge.
Perhaps the bigger surprise is who is not winning. Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, is one of the most recognizable figures in Chinese culture and has been a staple of the game for years. He is not in the top three. For an international audience, that is a useful reminder that Honor of Kings has built its own cast of original heroes who can rival a mythic figure in popularity.
The timing matters too. A new season is approaching, and long-time players are already counting down. For newer players, the anniversary period is less about the fresh season and more about catching up on rewards they missed earlier, including cosmetics tied to specific heroes. Guides explaining how to unlock these items quickly have been circulating widely, which keeps attention on the poll and on the game.
Fan votes like this one are a familiar ritual in Chinese mobile gaming. They generate discussion on social platforms, give streamers something to argue about, and let the publisher gauge which characters deserve more skins, events and story content in the year ahead. A strong showing for Li Xin could translate into more appearances for him down the line.
None of this is final. Voting is still open, and fan campaigns can shift quickly once communities organize behind a favorite. Sun Wukong’s supporters, in particular, may not stay quiet for long. But for now, the anniversary poll has produced a clear story: a two-form fighter most Western players have never heard of is beating one of the world’s most famous monkeys, and doing it by a wide margin.