It seems like Microsoft is way scaling back he potential rewards points.
Over the last few months:
- No more 100 point weekly xbox treasures
- Xbox monthly quest went from 2500 to 1000 points
- Xbox achievements went from 50 to 5 points
- No more edge bonus use of 20 points
- Puzzle? gone its seems
- This is a killer - it seems you need to open a new search tab in order to accumulate 5 points per search to get to 150 - it stops tabulating after one or two searches in same window / tab
- and a few others, I'm sure
Probably a drop in the proverbial budget bucket to give out all these rewards and its usefulness to get folks using xbox / edge / etc is reaching an end...?
Microsoft is notorious for simply ending things without notice - windows phone - microsoft band - surface duo - I'm used to it (owned all of those) but this little perk of rewards points going away? Might be switching to Chrome out of spite
I thought maybe it was my VPN of the Bing search page blocking my 150 per day and turned that off for a couple of days. No change, still only averaging 20 of the 150 per day. Today I have earned 40 before it stopped, see image below. I should have earned 10 in mobile but those are not showing up in count. I turned VPN back on as that was not the answer. I see in the string that there many impacts to earning MS Rewards points affecting users. I am wondering if it is MS simply trimming back on the points because of some modeling decision on their part or if it is some of the other companies offering actual rewards letting Microsoft know they may pull their offers as current redemptions are eating into their bottom line.
I am not sure we will ever know exactly, but it would be responsible of MS to notify us of point earning changes so we are not left guessing if it is us, our system or some nefarious scheme by MS causing unannounced changes.
