[furyofantares]

"Crisis" is a massively overblown word for this. And the "wordle community" is a drop in the bucket of regular players, and not remotely representative.

I did have a similar reaction personally to the "exciting news" framing but I'm not actually sure it's wrong. The original list of words was an excellent list, and it's been over 4 years.

[teeray]

> "Crisis" is a massively overblown word for this.

Given that it is Wordle, “panic” would be a far more appropriate word.

[alexfoo]

Alarm, dread, scare, shock, start, worry.

[hyperbovine]

Alarm is a good guess. On average I can solve a wordle in 3.6 turns when I start with this guess.

[ted_bunny]

Repeated letters are wasted utility. Wouldn't that make it suboptimal for a first move?

[muti]

Suboptimal - likely. There is some utility: a green letter is more useful than a yellow. Checking for a in two locations when a is a very commonly used letter is __useful__. Still likely much more useful to check for the presence of a fifth letter than a chance at knowing more precisely the location of an a.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

I used to use alert, until it was the word one day (got it in one!). Then I switched.

Apparently I should switch back, since it could be the word again.

[CamperBob2]

I always used the previous day's word as the starting word. IMHO that should have been how the game worked all along.

[maxkfranz]

I used to use “stare” or “stale” as the starting guess when I played Wordle, thinking you’d want to start off with the most common letters, like R-S-T-L-N-E from Wheel of Fortune.

[manarth]

"stale" was used a while back - since then I've been starting with "slate"

[kimos]

But now you can use it again!