My Hopeless Quest To Get A Highly Praised Message In Elden Ring

thegamer.com:

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.

Related: Elden Ring's Notorious 'Tutorial Hole' Secretly Teaches You A Valuable Lesson About The Game

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