Anybody?

Anybody participating in the current Microsoft bribe you to use our search engine scheme?  I was doing the club bing, that was all word games and you use the search engine to solve the puzzles until it closed down recently.  For me it was a pretty decent deal, in a few years I managed to get 2 xbox 360's (well I earned one and they cannot keep track of anything so the sent a second one) and a kitchen aid mixer and some other miscellaneous garbage.  I'd say that puts the net at around $800 or so dollars in money I didn't have to spend.  They capped you at 500 tickets a day, but if you where efficient you could do that in about an hour.

The current scam is faster to complete (especially if you just keep using search autocomplete) and caps you at 10 points for searches and they have some daily offers of 3-50 points you can complete.  You're out maybe 5-10 minutes a day, and can earn points to redeem towards xbox live subscriptions, or xbox live points.  I think they have some other crap in there, but it's of no real value to me.

Pretty sad, I think.  Here at Microsoft we are not above bribing you to use our products....

Club Bing

So one of the things that Microsoft started doing a few years ago as part of promoting Bing was start the website Club Bing.  It is really just a bunch of word games that you play for tickets.  Every game has some allotment of tickets you can earn, but I mostly play Chictionary, Word Slugger or Spelling Bee (note they are all the same game, with different skins) because they have the highest payout of tickets for time spent on a puzzle.  No the name of the game is to make words using the letters you get each round.  It is like an anagram, it's mostly stupid and would take forever for most people to complete each puzzle.  I finish each puzzle in between 1.5 minutes to 3 minutes.  How the F do I do that?  Well my friends that is what anagramssolved is for.

Now a sane person might ask why use a website to help you win a stupid word game from Microsoft?  Well it's the tickets you see, Since I have been playing I have won enough tickets for an Xbox360, and a digital picture frame.  If you get the daily maximum you can get the top prizes in about 90 days of playing (500 tickets max/day).  If the top prizes are what you are after then you want to keep your time played to a minimum, and get max yield on tickets.  Hence the anagram solver.  In a little over an hour you can get the daily max tickets and get on with your day.  The free xbox was enough to prove it to me, but at the beginning the prize department couldn't keep track of their shit so I actually ended up with 2 xboxes shipped to me.  I wouldn't count on that happening to anyone ever again and the 360 will likely never be the top prize again, but some of the stuff could be sold.  The Kitchenaide mixer retails for about $200 on amazon, but closer to $300 in stores.

What do you think, waste of time or interesting way to get free stuff?


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