Xbox Has Changed Game Pass Quests For 2024, And Fans Aren't Happy

It's always win some, lose some. The other weekly quests were good but I am guessing lots of gamers just started the game got the points then immediately quit the game. Same with the 250 weekly quests likely gamers were doing the minimum then again quitting the game. Just speculation but who knows. At the same time it since to see the 500 and 1000 quests have lower weekly requirements which was frustrating to bother with.

I liked that feature but it worked too well on me. I was always thinking "20 kills in doom 2016? That's a simple/quick way to get 200 points." Next thing I know I'm rolling credits again on Doom, dishonored, or whatever the game was.

My backlog might benefit if I'm not replaying full games because I got hooked while doing the quest.

@BacklogBrad But if you get rid of the backlog you will just be….Brad

With both the Xbox and PS5 schemes and points I never bother.
The only one I bother with is the switch, gold gets me money off the eshop.
Silver gets me all sorts of gifts and collectibles, though you have to pay postage.
And the dam system is so simple with My Nintendo, and it’s on normal internet and not just an app like some.

There’s going to be a lot of people playing McPixel 3 on GP this month I guess (seriously… you can earn achievements so quickly in it). I did that back when achievements still gave you 50 points. Not sure what I’ll do to get that 1000 one. Seems like a time commitment I can’t make. Time for Pure Xbox to make a guide for quickest games to earn all achievements in. 😋

Quests have been pretty terrible for months now

Personally never bothered with achievements. I'd rather they remove the entire thing. Always makes me feel like I have to 'work' for something. I do enough rl work. I just wanna press a button, boot up and play w/e I'm in the mood for.

Disappointing. It's free, so we can't really complain. But it doesn't look good on them. It's more a customer loyalty screw you vs we appreciate you.

Why do things always get suckified whenever I finally join them?

Took 2 days into the new year for Microsoft to piss people off, and I'm surprised it even took that long at this point. They've gotten quite brazen with enforcing bad ideas just because they got CoD.

@ATaco This. Got my Series X near the end of 2022, and within a year they announced the end of the Backwards Compatibility Program, started the gutting of the Rewards Program, bumped up the price of Game Pass, delisted hundreds of games, & are closing the 360 storefront.

I'm just glad I got my latest £50 worth of points in the bag for Tekken. Personally I'm done with them now. What used to be 5-10 mins a day is now a real chore to get anywhere near the amount.
Feel for you guys that have just got you're boxes but the writing has been on the wall for the last couple of years. Job accomplished though for MS, those freebies really pulled in the numbers.

What's so mind-boggling about this is, despite prior devastating misreading/misunderstanding their own customer blunders such as releasing an under-powered more expensive "does it all" console and losing an enormous amount of their gaming first customer base, they continue to make these sorts of decisions and blunders after working so hard to regain at least a modicum of respectability. The problem, I think, isn't Xbox, it is clearly the corporate geniuses at Microsoft making decisions that continue to indicate they know nothing, and have learned nothing, about their own customers who have loyally supported them even during the rough years. Now that they regained something of a fan-base, instead of keeping them happy, corporate oddly decides to pretty much put them to work for several hours a day as if they don't have jobs or lives other than playing their Xboxes for increasingly minimal returns. This latest decision may not be nearly as fatal as those made in the last generation, but if Microsoft thinks such decisions will keep their Xbox customer/fan-base loyal, they are going to be sadly mistaken.

The reward of 250 points for completing tasks in a weekly highlighted game was good for getting me to try more games. Oh well.

I was paying for game pass through reward points for years. It got me into the ecosystem and not going to end my game pass ultimate subscription any time soon. Rather ditch so many other subscriptions then GP. I liked the game pass weekly with try a game. Most of the time I just did the quest and moved on but once in awhile it would get me into a new game. All good, things change.

I really didn’t like the 5 and 250 rewards so I will try out this new scheme… hopefully this will fix the Tuesday cloud gaming surge as everyone clouded the 5 reward instead of downloading the game and really caused a bottleneck…

I have completely given up on Microsoft rewards ..everything they have done has just made it more painful...my mobile searches don't even work ..the timer on searches so you can't do them as quick....I used to like getting an achievement everyday for 50...gave me a little extra incentive to play everyday...but I ain't bothering for 5...so I have just give up with it all...I will cash out my remaing points potentially at the end of the year if they released a new console

When I used to frequently engage with MS Rewards, Quest Completionist always involved completing 45 daily quests and 15 weekly quests. How is Quest Completionist now "disgusting"?

I've never done game specific quests before or any. The only one I did was log in from a phone haha. Or sometimes I play PC games and get rewarded.

I like how they give us 1000 points and act like they did us a solid. It was 1000 points already for years until they nerfed it to 500 maybe 6 months ago but now it's more tedious to get. I stopped doing most of the gamepass quests after that nerf when all the daily stuff got cut in half or less along with the 500 pt one. The dumb search timer sucks too they added recently, 5 seconds between searches but at least they dropped the 15 min cooldown timer after a couple weeks , that was dumb

Oh I see, I have looked into further and seen there is another monthly quest for 500 points. So we are in fact not getting any less points.

The images are a bit misleading.

Probably fair. I should have edited it. Or at least apologised. Honestly I didn't expect you, or anyone to take that comment seriously. But here we are. Oh well, I am not PC enough to internet these days. I will edit it out.

Respect. 👊

I always found it weird that you got points for just starting a game. I'm sure a lot of people just launched it through cloud which is struggling with long queues lately.

Rewards is going to be gutted by the end of this year for sure. It's clear someone in Microsoft ran all the numbers and saw that it just was too expensive a system to run, and they need to slow down the points gain.

GPQ was a good way to get people to engage with different Game Pass games, but a requirement to do all this to get rewards is a barrier to all but the most dedicated, but still keep the points to save face. I think they'd get rid of it all together if they could.

@Markatron84 In those days we also had a daily for logging in to the Xbox app, rather than a daily for an achievement making it easier to get the 45 dailies.

Whilst these changes mean I won't get the 1000, I just take the rewards program for what it is, a bonus, I'll get as many points as I can from it, and once it no longer pays for my GPU I'll quit it, although being stacked for 3 years that will likely be a while off.

Its never available in my Country so who cares anyway....

@SubjectNine you still get points for logging into the app. I'm looking at the app right now.

@Markatron84 You're correct, you do get points for logging in to the app, but it's no longer a daily reward against the completionist reward. So whilst in the past you would only have to log in to the app and play a game a total of 45 times in the month, you now have to play a game and get an achievement 45 times in a month (some months will be easier than others depending if it's a 5 week month).

I'm just going to accept that I'll no longer get this reward and move on.

@SubjectNine Oh, I get you. 👍

I gave up on MS Rewards long before all the changes got everyone complaining anyway. For a while I was all in; I got Elden Ring for nothing that way. But to be honest, even in the "good old days" of MS Rewards, the amount of time you had to put into it to get a decent amount of points made it a chore, so I stopped. I just want to play games 🤷

Well, you can't take away something that people care about. What you do is gradually make it worse and worse over time, so that when you finally do kill it off, nobody notices.

I mean, look at Games with Gold.

With the recent changes combined I expect I will go from earning free gamepass 2 of 3 months to 1 of 3, depending on purchases. I did occasionally get into games via the quests, but honestly this was usually true only if they were already in my play later queue. I'll miss the earlier version but it won't impact me much. I wish they still had the monthly challenge things on the rewards site, where you had to get achievements from a certain set of games. I didn't always do those, but they were fun

Last month will probably be the final time I get clear of 20,000 points then and it was only just. Oh well. As long as I get enough monthly to claim gamepass monthly it's fine.

I never once paid any attention to Microsoft Rewards Quests outside of turning in unintentionally completed quests.

I've made about $20 worth of credit over the years from doing that.

Do people not realize that the old system was also terrible? It's like literally the lowest paying job you can give yourself. If you really need the money to support your gaming get a retail job for literally one or two days and make the same amount you'll make all year through rewards. You will absolutely have more time for playing games you actually like by doing so.

@Kaloudz I totally agree and even with the cuts I've not really seen much change, I use mine on Amazon Vochers as I get Game Pass via EE plus I'm two years ahead. I usually claim on or around the 13th, 05th, 25th then repeat.

I've claimed one on the 4th Dec, the 25th Dec and heading for around the 13th Jan, so for those who say it's not worth doing now well it's their loss.

I'm currently getting it with my broadband as it was an introduction offer but that's about to expire, and when my EE Sim only contract ends in a few months time I'm going to get a plan that offers an Inclusive Offer which can be Game Pass. I might already be entitled to Game Pass but won't show due to already having the offer.

Have a look at your app as I'm not sure there available on contracts with phones.

Is it really too much to ask what the plan is with points, the only thing that annoyed me is I have to find out third hand what might be happening 🤔

I get removing the specific game ones, it's a super rare thing where I actually play more than I need to to get the reward, maybe I'll stick around for an easy achievement for the daily.
But a GP game every day and 16 daily achievements almost feels like punishing buying games, and logically if I'm playing a GP title I'm not going to stop after earning a single achievement so I'm gonna have to play games I'm not interested in playing to drip feed achievements across 16 days

@RBRTMNZ No, it's not like literally the lowest paying job you can give yourself. That's like saying you're wasting your time sleeping because you're not getting paid to sleep. If you're employed, it's a hobby that you do outside of your job. if you're unemployed, it's a hobby that you do outside of your role as carer and/or looking for a job.

@R2DTARD77 We're all in the same boat. Easier just to wait like the rest of us, in the meantime you can focus on other stuff you enjoy or want to know.

@WOBNIARP When I’m sleeping I’m earning rest and that is extremely important to me, perhaps more so than money because I do my best work when well rested.

When people are playing games specifically to earn rewards they are earning rewards and those are worth less than a pence. Let’s be generous and say it takes 10 minutes/day to earn the 1000 points. That’s roughly 166 points per an hour. Game pass costs 12000 points so earning a single month requires 72 hours to earn £13 worth of value for an hourly rate of 18 pence per hour. That is worse than prisoners earn. Actively trying to earn rewards is an incredibly bad use of time.

@RBRTMNZ You've missed my point entirely, you're comparing it to a job, but newsflash... it's not a job! It couldn't be simpler. This is something you do outside of a job or when you're not searching for a job.
Also, for the record whether or not you think trying to earn rewards is an incredibly bad use of time overall, it's actually a really good use of time outside of work or looking for work. There's no other scheme, programme or whatever else you might consider calling Microsoft Rewards that is anywhere near as good, despite the reduction in points over time.
That is, of course, if you accept that it isn't a job.

I’ll wind up getting more points. I had to stop doing the game specific ones due to time constraints, now I don’t need to worry. A pity as I found some fun titles that way.

@WOBNIARP You’ve missed my point entirely. I’m not dense, I know it’s not a job, my point is that it is way more labor than an actual job so it’s a waste of time.

@RBRTMNZ We'll have to agree to disagree. It may be a waste of time to you but that doesn't mean it's a waste of time for every other person, that's just your own personal opinion rather than fact. Still, nobody says you have to take part. You do you.

"In a nutshell, this means that if you want to acquire as many points as possible from the Xbox Game Pass Quests program in 2024, you're going to need to put more work and a near-daily focus into it than you did in 2023."

And just like that. Majority stopped caring or trying for Microsoft Rewards points.

@WOBNIARP You know you're right. It is none of my business so even if I am right, that the value of rewards does not justify making an effort to earn them, I am wrong to chastise others for participating. My heart is in the right place, I really want to be helpful by pointing out that this program does not offer much value, but it doesn't make any sense to argue with people over it when they want to participate.

@RBRTMNZ 😂 It's not that it's none of your business, you are entitled to your own experience and opinion mate, it's just that for you it may not offer much value but for others it may offer more value. Each person has a different sense of what gives them value and what doesn't. I'm sorry that right now you feel the value just isn't there for you, but I hope you find what works for you, stick with that and enjoy the value of that just as much. 💖