"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.

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teeray 12 hours ago | parent [-]

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

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

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alexfoo 11 hours ago | parent [-]

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

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hyperbovine 11 hours ago | parent [-]

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

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maxkfranz 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"stale" was used a while back - since then I've been starting with "slate"

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ted_bunny 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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muti 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I always used the previous day's word as the starting word. IMHO that should have been how the game worked all along.