I started my Elden Ring journey with the best intentions. Whenever I survived an ambush, dodged a deadly trap, or found an item hidden away somewhere, I'd leave a carefully worded message to help my fellow Tarnished. I'd ache over the wording, making sure I was as clear as possible, even using gestures to point at what I was talking about. I got pretty good at it too, forming coherent sentences out of the game's purposefully limited messaging system.
If you're out of the loop, Elden Ring lets players leave messages in the world for each other, which you construct by stringing together pre-ordained words and connecting phrases. As someone who is constantly fearful of what lies around the next dark corner, these messages are essential to my enjoyment of the game. There's a lot of shitposting ('Try jumping' next to a deadly drop is a classic), but the more you play, the better you get at filtering the junk out.
I was pretty pleased with myself, leaving helpful messages everywhere, imagining my warning about a rat ambush saving some poor sod from an embarrassing death. But then I realised that I was never getting any heals. If someone praises a message in Elden Ring, the person who wrote it gets a health boost. There are some amazing videos out there of people inches from death, only to be saved by a sudden, unexpected message appraisal.
I looked at the messages menu, where you can view a history of the ones you've left, and I had no appraisals. Nothing! I wondered if the server had actually uploaded them to other people's games. Maybe it's a bug? It was a bit of a downer having spent so much time crafting these messages to get nothing in return, so I decided to change tact. If I wanted a taste of that healing magic for myself, I'd have to stop taking the game so damn seriously.
Elden Ring is secretly a comedy festival, and the Tarnished are stand-up comedians competing to make an audience laugh. Play the game online for any length of time and you see the same gags everywhere. Messages saying 'dog' next to turtles. 'Try finger, but hole' next to slumped-over corpses. 'Snake, try stealth' next to patches of tall grass. 'First off, crouching and then let there be dung' next to a gesture of a character squatting over the side of a balcony.
A lot of these jokes are quite blatantly 'recycled' (read: stolen), because people have realised that they can get cheap appraisals out of writing them—and that means cheap, possibly life-saving heals. So I decided to lower myself to their level and post my own selection of 'dogs' and 'try finger, but holes', purely for the potential healing benefits, rather than thinking I was being funny. My days of leaving constructive messages were well and truly over.
Didn't work. The Elden Ring joke message economy is heavily oversaturated, and I failed to get in on the ground floor. If thousands of people are placing 'dog' in front of merchants' donkeys and roaming turtles, then that reduces the chances (I assume) of mine filtering through to people's games. My stupid throwaway meme messages were failing as hard as the ones I spent time thinking about. I was investing heavily in this market and getting no returns.
So far, my most 'successful' message—to the tune of 7 positive appraisals—was one I left in a popular rune farming spot near Bestial Sanctum. Bored of killing Vulgar Militiamen over and over again, I left a message that read: 'Weak foe, O, weak foe, and then, weak foe, O, weak foe.' This clearly resonated with people who were there doing the same thing. However, the fact that this is my greatest messaging achievement in 20 hours of play says it all.
But I'm not giving up. If people can get 1500 appraisals for writing a message that says 'door' next to a door, then surely I can too. Being helpful didn't work. Stealing memes didn't work. Nothing I've tried has. What's a guy gotta do to get some free heals? Maybe it's because so many people are playing the game. On Steam alone, just under a million people played it today. Yeah, that's it. It's not that my messages suck—there are just too many of them.
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