According to Sensor Tower’s report in 2023, more than 200 third-party platforms worldwide provide recharge proxy services to “Honor of Kings,” but some differences are significant in security and price. Let’s consider the Southeast Asian market for example. On compliant platforms, while recharging through payment interfaces officially certified by Tencent (e.g., MyCard or Codashop), the success rate of the account’s arrival is 99.6%, while on unverified small platforms, there is a 15% account suspension rate due to fraud or black card issues. For example, a top service provider implemented PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) encryption technology, bringing down the risk of leakage of user payment information to 0.03%. While doing this, it offered a “90-second arrival guarantee” and automatically refunded an extra 5% of points for late payments. Its order repurchase rate reached 82%.
Technically, kings top up security honor relies on risk management systems automated and regionalized pricing policies. In 2022, Tencent upgraded proxy charging API interface to support real-time anti-fraud detection. With integration, third-party platforms are able to improve interception rate of suspicious transactions from the industry average of 76% to 98.5%. Let us take an example of the Brazilian region. One specific platform uses local operator cooperation (e.g., Vivo and Claro) to offer prepaid cards. The cost of recharging 6,480 points is 259 reais (around 52 US dollars), which is 48% lower than the official exchange rate in the US region (99.99 US dollars). Moreover, the probability of man-in-the-middle attacks is suppressed to below 0.01% through the HTTPS protocol and two-factor authentication (2FA). According to the “White Paper on Mobile Game Payment Security”, the platforms utilizing such technologies had a mere 0.8% refund rate, much lower than 19% of non-standard channels.
Regarding risk case warnings, Indonesia in 2022 suffered from a “black card proxy recharge”. Thieves used stolen credit cards to offer players cheap points, and the account was banned over 24,000 times with players losing over 3.4 million US dollars. Compliance platform via ISO 27001 certification and Tencent’s license reduced the likelihood of account ban from 23% in black industry channel to 0.15%. For instance, one of the service providers has joined forces with Tencent to launch the “Safe Direct Recharge” service. It requires players to bind their mobile phone number and email address for verification. They can get an additional 8% point bonus for a 100 US dollar recharge. In the meantime, the error rate in handling data has been reduced from 4.2% in manual mode to 0.05% in the automatic system.
In its regionalized products, Tencent has made its payment method compliant with the 2023 EU Digital Services Act, allowing foreign competitors to top up directly through channels such as PayPal and Skrill. It supports settlement in 38 currencies, with exchange rate conversion accuracy up to four decimal places. For instance, it takes Turkish players 320 lira (approximately 12 US dollars) to recharge 5,000 points through the local platform Oyunda, which is 33% lower than the Eurozone official price. Moreover, the arrival time was shortened from the usual cross-border transfer time of 2 hours to 3 minutes. According to the financial report of Tencent, third-party channels contributed to 41% of the revenue of the global version of “Honor of Kings” in Q3 2023, and the average recharging times of players increased from 1.2 times a month to 2.5 times.
In brief, to complete honor of kings top up safely, one must choose a location that has Tencent approval, PCI DSS support and live risk management, and give preference to using local payment platforms (such as prepaid cards in their area or electronic wallets). The customers can reduce the cost of point purchase to $0.009 per point through comparing fluctuation in exchange rates (with below 0.5% error rate) and discount accumulation rules (such as “double for the first recharge” or “full reduction activities”), and ensuring the account risk probability at below 0.1%, earning a double guarantee of high cost performance and safety.