Game Pass

I got a couple of codes that are meant to me used by Microsoft employees and partners I think, either way free membership for 4 months and counting now :)

binged through the Yakuza and Like a Dragon games, Football manager etc, but the biggest let down has been the overhyped 1st party offerings, I guess in future I won't have to stump up money for the base activision/blizzard games so that will make game pass worth it (even if I'm paying again down the line) although I can see the cost of the service going up for sure. Spotify, Disney + and Netflix all quietly increase their prices by a pound a two or year. Especially for the premium tier subs if they offer it.
 
Personality+ said:
I got a couple of codes that are meant to me used by Microsoft employees and partners I think, either way free membership for 4 months and counting now :)

binged through the Yakuza and Like a Dragon games, Football manager etc, but the biggest let down has been the overhyped 1st party offerings, I guess in future I won't have to stump up money for the base activision/blizzard games so that will make game pass worth it (even if I'm paying again down the line) although I can see the cost of the service going up for sure. Spotify, Disney + and Netflix all quietly increase their prices by a pound a two or year. Especially for the premium tier subs if they offer it.
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spread the wealth :)
 
Personality+ said:
(I shouldn't have said fully free) I did buy the codes I was given, but looks like where I got it from has no stock now, I paid $25 so at least it's paid for itself already :) obviously it was sold to me with the possibility it can stop working whenever (or keep working indefinitely)
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Ah, feel free to DM me the link I can keep an eye out :)

My free one with BT expires Feb 2024, I may be able to get another year through my parents account after that.

I did 3 years free a long time ago when Alienware were giving out codes, I stacked those as far as I could.

Think I only paid for 1 month so far in the last 5 years! :D
 
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HungryHippos said:
Ah, feel free to DM me the link I can keep an eye out :)

My free one with BT expires Feb 2024, I may be able to get another year through my parents account after that.

I did 3 years free a long time ago when Alienware were giving out codes, I stacked those as far as I could.

Think I only paid for 1 month so far in the last 5 years! :D
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Oh what's this? I'm with BT
 
jrwagh333 said:
Oh what's this? I'm with BT
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If you sign in there is an option to enable 12 months of game pass for free, or at least there was for me.

Go to My BT section, then into Your Products, was in there. Worth a look. If you already have game pass I think it passes billing control over to BT, but at the end it returns to you and you keep any time you had before, something like that.
 
HungryHippos said:
If you sign in there is an option to enable 12 months of game pass for free, or at least there was for me.

Go to My BT section, then into Your Products, was in there. Worth a look. If you already have game pass I think it passes billing control over to BT, but at the end it returns to you and you keep any time you had before, something like that.
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Thanks. Not there for me, just the option to switch billing over to them like you said.
 
HungryHippos said:
Still doing this but the 250 points for playing a multi-player game is so fickle sometimes.

I wish I could just send a fake post to a URL to pretend I did it, it's the most annoying/painful one to get each day. The other activities are relatively reliable.

I boot into AOE 1 and then go to lobbies, sometimes takes a bit of time to get into one as they're often full.

Once I'm in, sometimes I get booted out randomly (perhaps host ends the lobby or just feels like booting people out), but if not, I've had it take 1-2 hours to trigger the 250 point thing, if it even wants to bother at all.

I only tend to leave it a long time if I'm using the PC for other stuff anyway, if not I shut it down if it's failed to get the points by the time my script has finished searches and things.

Who else still does this and how do they find it? Sometimes feels like a lot of work for minimal returns, but free is free!
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It goes through phases. At the moment it seems to be especially bad but I noticed it normally completes in the afternoon for me. I just leave AoE running in the background and occasionally check it to see if I've been booted out of the lobby, annoyingly if I set up my own lobby no-one joins so I assume there's some issue on my end but not sure.

With the continual nerf of points it's getting harder to get points - the daily achievement, not that I went for that one often, was reduced from 50 to 5 a couple of days ago. I suspect the play with friends will vanish at some point because 'reasons'.
 
I'll still do the searches and daily activities at least so long as they don't take up too much time, and mostly I can do them when I fire up work stuff in the morning on weekdays.

My searches are still automated which helps a lot, they did nerf it so that you can't just visit bing.com/search?q=thing anymore, have to add &form=something else onto the url to get it work, though it doesn't seem to matter what is on the form parameter.

Example: bing.com/search?q=thing&form=whatever
 
Looks like MS is nerfing rewards slowly, they have removed the +12 daily points for using Bing on searches, and also the activities under the headlines are now +1 or +2 instead of +5 or +10 like they used to be.

For now, doing an AOE lobby join is still worth 250 + 25 each day, but not sure if they'll nerf that soon.

If the points drop too low, then I'll stop once I've redeemed them, currently the effort to reward is still OK, and a lot of it is either automated or it's easy enough to do.
 
HungryHippos said:
Looks like MS is nerfing rewards slowly, they have removed the +12 daily points for using Bing on searches, and also the activities under the headlines are now +1 or +2 instead of +5 or +10 like they used to be.

For now, doing an AOE lobby join is still worth 250 + 25 each day, but not sure if they'll nerf that soon.

If the points drop too low, then I'll stop once I've redeemed them, currently the effort to reward is still OK, and a lot of it is either automated or it's easy enough to do.
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I'm thinking the same - still worth persevering with for now, but if the Xbox app rewards get nerfed I'll probably stop and not renew Game Pass when my sub expires.
 
Pretty much similar thoughts. Though I'm not sure what the cut off point is for how many points make it worth it for game pass tbh. I've gone the route of buying gold to convert to get game pass, then using points to get vouchers for stuff. Effectively for ~£120 (that's 4 years of game pass) I've bought a new series s and about £40 worth of stuff off amazon so far after (plus another £45 of amazon vouchers in MS points to redeem if I can), IIRC, a year an a half of doing it the rewards stuff.
Though there's now the conversion nerf so, *shrugs*. And the all the other nerfs so far so I'll see how many points I'll be getting at the end of the month as I started tracking them in october because I was bored :cry:
 
If they don't change too much it's basically possible to get PC game pass in perpetuity along with the odd redemption for Amazon if you wanted.

Current points are worth about £120/year, £10/month, not great, not terrible.
 
loftie said:
Pretty much similar thoughts. Though I'm not sure what the cut off point is for how many points make it worth it for game pass tbh. I've gone the route of buying gold to convert to get game pass, then using points to get vouchers for stuff. Effectively for ~£120 (that's 4 years of game pass) I've bought a new series s and about £40 worth of stuff off amazon so far after (plus another £45 of amazon vouchers in MS points to redeem if I can), IIRC, a year an a half of doing it the rewards stuff.
Though there's now the conversion nerf so, *shrugs*. And the all the other nerfs so far so I'll see how many points I'll be getting at the end of the month as I started tracking them in october because I was bored :cry:
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At the moment you need to earn 10,500 points per month to get one month of ( auto-redeem ) GPU. Without auto redeem it's 12,000 points. If the Xbox app rewards ( for playing a PC game etc ) get nerfed then that will be a hard task. On Reddit this evening there is news of further nerfs to the Rewards program for Bing searches. The program has taken a real hammering these last 2 weeks ; lots of accounts being suspended ( sometimes with hundreds of thousands points lost ) and people having difficulty, or being denied the option to trade in points for Amazon gift cards etc.
 
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xaldub said:
At the moment you need to earn 10,500 points per month to get one month of ( auto-redeem ) GPU. Without auto redeem it's 12,000 points. If the Xbox app rewards ( for playing a PC game etc ) get nerfed then that will be a hard task. On Reddit this evening there is news of further nerfs to the Rewards program for Bing searches. The program has taken a real hammering these last 2 weeks ; lots of accounts being suspended ( sometimes with hundreds of thousands points lost ) and people having difficulty, or being denied the option to trade in points for Amazon gift cards etc.
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I don't see any auto-redeem option, is this from Xbox only?

For people with lots of points, it's risky holding so much I think, I got a work colleague with more than 400K points, but if they just decide to ban you one day, goodbye points.

So I prefer to redeem often, just in case :)
 
HungryHippos said:
I don't see any auto-redeem option, is this from Xbox only?

For people with lots of points, it's risky holding so much I think, I got a work colleague with more than 400K points, but if they just decide to ban you one day, goodbye points.

So I prefer to redeem often, just in case :)
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I have the auto-redeem option on both desktop and console. I'm sitting on almost 100,000 points right now - will probably cash out in either MS store credit or Amazon giftcards. I haven't broken any TOS, but I don't trust Microsoft not to wield the banhammer on innocent parties.
 
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