Xbox Making Big Adjustment To Popular Microsoft Rewards Punch Card

And if it's on game pass quests it means achievements in games not in game pass won't count...

Seems they are slowly but surely nerfing the heck out of rewards. We've already seen a good reductions on lots of the monthly quest related activities. Soon rewards won't be worth taking the time to do 🫤

What a bunch of crap.

@Chuffer I was bummed when the monthly game pass quest for daily/weekly was cut down to 500 from 1000. They also seem to have cut a lot of the weekly stuff from 25 or 50 to….5.

I still participate in stuff but not nearly as into getting all the points as I was before because it’s not as time effective.

Just getting it to work properly would be a major improvement. Previous years, I managed to finish the punch cards, only to not be rewarded with the MS points and then had to spend ages talking to the most unhelpful team, only to be sent round in circles.

I've been buying up GPU time cards for a while now with the rewards points and as a result I'll be gaming for free for the foreseeable future. Have 2 years and 3 months currently.

meh - for the past few weeks the rewards app refuses to even open for me. that coupled with about a month ago it stopped registering achievements. I reported to rewards support and got my streak reinstated and they could detect the achievements i scored and provided me with the relevant points...but I really cba to do that every few weeks cos their system just doesnt work.

Also the xbox app on my phone will only load the quests when I try to load it on a mobile connection, if on wifi it just doesnt work. It feels like they are intentionally sabotaging rewards so people stop claiming free money

I like it, but unfortunately Microsoft doesn't support it here (Czech Republic) and it's not a very nice business card 😏

The real ones that lose out on this are all those rubbish games on gp that offer easy achievements that everybody panic plays to continue their streaks. Sad times indeed.

Thanks I've been wondering about that

They've taken away so many opportunities to earn points, this is just the latest way they're doing that

Last time I tried to get free game pass ultimate from reward points the code wouldn't work and it crashed my xbox when trying it on there. I couldn't even buy anything on the store for about five days after that, even with my own money. Had to get gold by chatting on the xbox support site and they said the game pass ultimate code didn't work because I'd already used another one in the past and should only be used once, even though I've been doing it since late last year🙃 I'm just redeeming the gift card money now instead.

if you want my honest though about xbox reward it's used to be awesome on 360 era and xbox one era now our days they simply shrink or reduce the actual reward you can get in canada at least they often make quest dull to do and just unatractive if you spend 200$ now our days you get roughly 18$ reward xbox was used to be consumer friendly on xbox one era i receive 320$ from microsoft reward now you cannot even buy a full price game you have to ruin yourself. I start to dislike that program.

Wow, that really sucks for anybody who doesn't have GPU. It's not like people without GPU were swimming in chances to earn points anyways.

@Krzzystuff. I did that..... Two and a half years ago. The time flies by quicker than you realize.

The various changes are not my favorite, but it is still a way to get credit over time with little effort. Seems like it is being streamlined more toward engaging with gamepass or just spending money in the store. Which is fine, I like the Nintendo gold coin incentives for spending in the store. It's a nice little extra. I wonder if they will keep the daily Bing engagement incentives.

More bad news for rewards.

@Kaloudz you better before its gone completely

@Chuffer yea its been nerfed to shyt. Prob realized how much money they were giving away

@FatalBubbles It is real shame they are slowly making it worthless as it one of best things they do.

All the money I got from it got put straight back into Xbox as I used it for discounts on games. Ultimately I will spend less as those discounts won't tempt me add my own money for store items. Silly but I think a lot of people do the same so in the long run it will only cost them revenue not save it.

Looks like Microsoft are closing some of the doors on areas where they were giving stuff away for next to nothing. Surely that's not a bad compromise if it keeps prices down elsewhere.

@YungCizzle24 It actually made me spend more than I ordinary would. I would put the money I got from rewards towards a discount on store items I wanted that I normally wouldn't buy unless I had a discount such as the one I get using my points.

In the end if the points aren't worth getting, I'll likely spend less in the store. They'll end up loosing money rather than saving it I think.

@Chuffer that's not true. I'm earning more points now than ever before. ~25k points a month on free offers. It used to be 17-18k.

@relaxplease It is definitely less for me. What new things do you do to add 8K a month?

@FatalBubbles The xbox app (different than the game pass app) on my tablet has 3 daily offers worth a total 165-185 pts a day. 1 is play one level of Jeweled which launches directly from the app, 2 is play any pc game pass game, 3 is login to the xbox app on mobile once per day. Takes 2 mins.

On Edge there's the 2 fitness videos for another 40 per day. The shopping game which will usually get you 40-50 a day, just blindly guessing. Takes another 5 mins.

The weekly game pass quests are worth as much as the old monthly quests, you just have to actually play the games now and it's spread out over 4 weeks.

They've shifted points around, but it's definitely not less than it was before. There's more points available now, by almost 50%. It's 35k pts for 3 months GPU, and I'm earning that in 6 weeks, spending ~10 mins a day. I'm at 23,786 pts this month and that's without spending any money, with 3 days left and the new weekly quests that I haven't done yet, and missing the last several days of the achievement offer that hasn't been working.

I encourage everyone to go check out Rewards Hunter on youtube. He has a great channel that keeps you up to date on all offers and does step by step videos on how to earn all of the weekly game pass quests. I usually don't need his videos, but when I do they are really helpful. He also just seems like a pretty decent guy.

I don't want them having requirements for Achievements at all - it makes me not want to play games having Achievements be more like a currency than a nice thing. Just track play time instead.

@relaxplease I can't do the Play a PC game one because the Microsoft Store either won't open on my PC or the times it does, won't download games. And all the solutions are tech things I don't understand. :/

@shoeses can you install the xbox app on your pc? Because you download and install game pass games from that, not the MS store. I don't play much on pc, I just load up the MS Solitaire Collection and that counts for the offer.

@relaxplease Xbox store on PC doesn't let me sign in. I click it, it turns white, back to the same screen. And IDK how you're finding these fitness videos or shopping games, Edge is impossible for me to navigate.

@shoeses it sounds like you need to do a clean install of windows.

Why can't you navigate edge? It's a basic chromium web browser

The fitness videos and shopping game were right on the rewards page on edge in the "more activities" section a while back and then I bookmarked the pages.

For the fitness thing find the short videos in the 7, 14, and 30 day challenges. Lots of 1-2 min videos available.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/fitness-challenges/

For the shopping game scroll down the page halfway and there is a blue section where you guess the lowest priced of 3 products 10 times. If you get it right you get 10 pts each time.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/shopping

@relaxplease Thanks for the info. Seems like that stuff isn’t things I’ll ever do/see so while the changes helped you, it lowered the total for me.

About time it gets fixed. The card did not auto-detect achievements and needed 1-3 attempts to register. Then from 12am to maybe 6am, it didn't work at all.

@relaxplease Are you based in the US? Does the fitness/shopping extras work in the U.K.?

im generally averaging over 25k points a month

@shoeses I had a similar issue a couple times. It had to do with clock sync. MS support help me the first time, and they were surprisingly competent.

@FatalBubbles it hasn't been lowered, you're just choosing not to participate. Which is fine, keeping up with daily tasks is not for everyone. But that's essentially all the rewards program is

@frosty360 I'm in the US and I know it varies by region but I don't know the details on that

@relaxplease cheers, can't see these extras in the UK

@frosty360 the links I provided are for US. I looked on reddit and you should be able to do them there in the UK. Try to replace the "us" with "gb" in the /en-us/ part of the link.

If that doesn't work there is a pretty active rewards community on reddit, they provide the links there if you search for "reddit microsoft rewards fitness challenge uk" it will come up.

@relaxplease I guess I can rephrase it. The rewards you get for the ways I participate in the program have been lowered….

@FatalBubbles I don't think that's true. Game pass quests, the rewards app on xbox, the daily set and searching bing on edge/mobile are still offering 17-18k per month, same as it's always been

The only thing that's changed is the structure of the game pass quests, but they offer the same amount of points and are largely the same activities as before, just slightly longer, or more involved.

And now moving the daily achievement to quests instead of the app. We'll see how many points they offer for that. It could well be lower than before.

@relaxplease cheers mate- much appreciated

I had to make an account just so I could comment on this. Those of you saying things like "another blow to Microsoft rewards" or "wow now it's even harder to earn points" completely baffle me. Stop whining and learn how to use the program. In the past few months they have made changes to earn huge amounts of points easier and just lowered the price of Game Pass Ultimate to its lowest ever price when redeeming points. March isn't even over yet and I'm at 15,081 points for the month. You can now auto-redeem 10,500 points on the 1st of each month for a month of Game Pass Ultimate that is the cheapest its ever been and you can easily earn that many points even just being passive with the program. The monthly 1,000 point quest in GPU being reduced to 500 is no big deal because now there is a weekly quest worth 250 for doing some small task. Do them all and thats now 1,500 points... so stop commenting that they ruined it smh. All the new points you can earn with the standard xbox phone app etc, etc.

Yea this daily achievement card going away is kind of a bummer I like being able to earn that when I'm fixated on a non game pass title, but I'm interested to see how they integrate it into the gamepass quests.

@relaxplease this is great- with your advice I managed to get it working in the UK thanks! For the Xbox app number of points I think I need to have 7+ friends to get the full reward (I have 6!) Would I be able to add you? Many thanks

It was awful. Way too many times where it didn't work, and I also hated having to spare or parse some achievements out to earn them on a daily basis, when playing a single game dedicatedly. It feels so much better to earn a bunch of cheevos at once.

@Kaloudz They said they were not raising GamePass prices but they didn’t say what other ways they were going to cut costs… got to please the shareholders…

@relaxplease Yeah, I can read that again and again but IDK what that means or how to do it. The fact that I haven't touched any of these apps and they're broken makes me think they're just bad.

The actual search engine part of Edge is fine, but the home etc. pages are hard to navigate because they're excessively cluttered - how am I supposed to find anything along a wall of ads & articles smooshed together? The only thing I've ever seen in the "More Activities" sections are things that can be completed with a single click. But thank you for the links, I'll make sure to add those to the daily routine.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do away with the 3 achievements week for weekly rewards. That has stopped me cold from playing Xbox as much as used to. I'm like well crap can't play any more till next week when that offer is going on for achievements.

@shoeses EXACTLY!

Seems to me that they've gradually been reducing the amount of points we can earn or making it more difficult. I've got almost 100k points at the moment, waiting for something to spend them on, but they've stripped out or nerfed loads of the easier ways to earn. Halved the amount of points for the Quest Completionist or whatever it's called from 1000 to 500 recently, and upped the ask for many of the other quests. Instead of, say, simply playing a game it's now always 'kill 25 enemies' or something. Getting real stingy with those points lately.

@Alex79uk no you're just a scrub lol

I never used this stuff, I only get some Bing rewards on game pass if they coincide with what I’m doing. I only once went out of my way to do the quest stuff in the spirit of testing it but it’s not worth my gaming time to be playing something I didn’t want to play.

It's entirely free GPU plus about $175 of xbox store credit per year. That's worth 10 minutes a day to me. It's almost $6 bucks an hour MS is paying us for minimal engagement with their products and partners.

@Bluerangervegeta you say it sucks for anyone without GPU, but the thing is you can buy 1 month of GPU and then gain access to these offers and start earning GPU entirely free

For all the people complaining that they are shrinking the rewards or whatever...
Yes I have noticed that things like Game Pass Ultimate have started costing 2 thousand more credits I believe (14k instead of 12k)... So if that is what you are going to for sure be redeeming your monthly Rewards point on then it is best to sign up for the "Auto Redeem" feature... It makes it the cheapest amount possible. You do have to sign up a month ahead of time though.

But as someone who recently just picked up a PS5 (on sale and directly from a store!! No scalper BS) MS Rewards points is sooooo much better than what they have going on over there haha.
We should all be very grateful. They don't even have good sh*t to redeem if you do somehow accumulate a lot of points.

This never worked for me, by design the program doesnt accept achievements after around 11est which is when I do most of my gaming. So moving to the gamepass app is a huge win as that app actually works.

MS rewards has been extremely generous, my goal was to get 500k by the end of the gen to buy the next Xbox. We're only 2 years in and I'm already at something like 515k. People complaining are nuts.

@DAYYLITE Er, yeah ok mate. 👍

@shoeses I play Solitaire every day for 10 points. You have to watch an ad for 30 seconds before the game starts. I can never get points to play an XBox multiplayer game on my pc as the only one i have downloaded is World of Tanks 2.