Wonder why the pod didn't let him logout, and why the game's starting quest bugged out. He should have contacted a gm about the first one, and maybe filed a bug report for the latter.
Also, the fact it doesn't detect his pulse is easily fixed: contact customer support, say your pod is bugged and cant detect your pulse so it always calls for ambulances. Have them disable the pulse-sensing feature for you, and tweak any features relying on that biometric.
If you bought a strategy guidebook and it said "You should give up playing X" then you bought a shitty book
No, many guides to games tell you to avoid builds/skills that are traps (or balanced so poorly they might as well be). An example is in any game where a bug causes any build meant to boost a specific stat to somehow overflow into being worse than level 1 when you reach late-game levels. Or ones where no cap means they stop working at all in late game (like projectile-speed going faster than 1 screen per tick, and lacking any hit-scanning between the positions to compensate, so projectiles clip through any enemies you want to hit).
ps: you don't buy strategy guidebooks. They are either found online, or come for free alongside the game. Since it was advising on the meta, the one he mentions must have been user-generated and online.