What is happening with Rewards?!

Hey Microsoft rewards, you are lousy. Now I have to wait 5 minutes after 2 or 3 counting searches. I'm supposed to waste my whole day thinking about going back to the computer and doing this? You've reduced points. You've taken away promotions. What do you care how long it takes me to search, you're still getting those clicks so you can pretend you're almost as popular as Google.

Sorry that your multi-billion dollar company can no longer afford to let us earn $5 a month

I take this as MS giving up on the Bing platform. They were already trailing behind every search engine out there, but now they have caused half their user base to say "Oh well, back to Google".

It's sad because it was such a good incentive that provided a way to give out "rewards" for helping pad their numbers. All I take these actions as is MS throwing in the towel.

Why they didn't just tell us "You got two months left and then we're stopping this free stuff... we gotta pay for Activision/Blizzard somehow."

I'm completely baffled, and whoever made this decision has obviously reached the level of their incompetence. Hopefully they fix it.

I’ve got about 131,000 points right now and my weekly sets in the app is at 124 weeks straight. Didn’t even realize they got rid of the monthly punch card. They are getting more and more stingy with giving points on top of forcing people to take this “necessary time” during searches. None of it is “EVOLVING” you are “DEVOLVING” and just upsetting your fanbase who partakes in the rewards program. I think what happened is Microsoft said hey let’s make a rewards program and give back to our loyal customers. Than realized oh **** There are way to many people that are using this to there advantage and getting free stuff. So let’s negate that and make it less and less so eventually everyone will drop off so we can shut it down and say oh we shut it down due to a big dip in user activity. Chump like behavior. I enjoyed the rewards program becuase I haven’t had to pay for GPU since the EA exploit days. Once I get to 140k I’ll redeem my 4 three month GPU and just stop using it all together. Unless they make it where you can get points as easy as before. But highly unlikely. The US and UK will be the last two places they pull MS Rewards all together. Give our the two to three years from now.

If Bing were truly superior to Google Microsoft never would have resorted to providing incentives to using its platform.

I imagine that they have decided that these incentives aren't achieving their goals, so are giving it the death spiral, which will likely migrate most of us back to Google...

Microsoft has been on quite a roll, lately, and not in a good, we appreciate and respect our users, sort of way. Between gutting Microsoft Rewards (removing the puzzle piece game just before many were about to get their 1,000-point bonus, significantly cutting back on the number of daily points a user could earn, and other changes), Cancelling the ability to scan receipts and earn a penny or two on their cashback program, aggressively trying to force users from their simple, easy to se mail app to their ad heavy, and annoying "new outlook" app, to having their browser, Edge, not actually close when you think you've closed it (check Task Manager and you'll see it is still running in the background, using a large chunk of your computers resources, for whatever reason), they seem to be becoming very aggressive towards their users. I guess the only bright side is, now I can free up some space on my phone by removing Edge, and Bing. I'll still use Edge on my PC once in a while but will make FireFox my main browser, and I'll be certain to use Task Manager to close it rather than let it run in the background. Also, I'll find an alternative to the Mail app, but it won't be the Outlook app. It's too bad, I used to be a huge MS supporter