The beloved game Wordle—which is taking over everybody's social media feeds as people proudly post their results as they attempt to figure out one five-letter long word per day—was bought recently by the New York Times after its popularity skyrocketed.
While not much has changed about the game—including how to play or whether or not it is free—some people are speculating the Times upped the difficulty level on Wordle.
And people are roasting it for that reason.
Words for the past few days of puzzles have been extremely difficult to solve, or so the internet says.
But the Times disputes this claim. In fact, the word of the day is predetermined by the developer of the game, so the publication has very little to do with the word choice.
The only thing the New York Times has actively done so far has been to remove offensive words from the guessing dictionary.
In fact, not only have the words been predetermined, but they have been for a couple of years.
A cheating hack for the game reveals the words for the game have been embedded in the source code since the beginning of the game's development.
A Twitter user said—upon checking the code—he found the Times was keeping to that word list in the same order.
However, the New York Times Wordle page has suffered several technical difficulties since its launch. So while it hasn't changed the game, it has negatively affected it.
And while they continue to work out the bugs and the words continue to work themselves through the source code, it may be a sign things in the Wordle universe are just about to get even more difficult.
