The Old Spice Challenge is Challenged

The Microsoft Rewards program went live yesterday Feb 12th, albeit some bumps in the road. It seems that some gamers were a bit annoyed when the official site did not go launch at midnight as expected. Even the masses that chose to take the day off to unlock achievements, couldn’t register until around 5pm PST.

The frustration of waiting for the site to go live didn’t end at 5pm however. Much like everything Microsoft tries the first time around, they seriously underestimated demand, server requirements and bandwidth. The Rewards website was buckling under the pressure of seemingly thousands of gamers trying to get registered. All gamers were getting was a webpage time out error after long waits.

While cruising Major Nelsons’s blog, it seems some creative gamers had found several ways to get around the site problems and actually got registered. This morning however, the site is still about as bad as it was last night. If you can even manage to get around the server timeout webpage, any Rewards pages you try and load typically fail to display.

The community after getting registered are fairly disappointed with the Old Spice Challenge though. Many of the material prizes are limited to 2500 in quantity while there are some 5 million Xbox Live members. So unless you take the day off to unlock your 1500 points, most likely all these prizes will be taken within 48 hours. So if you were planning on taking the full two months to unlock your 1500 points, all you’ll end up with for your effort is an Old Spice gamer pic (we can hear your excitement from here). If you don’t have Contra, there’s a chance you’ll be able to snag that if you take more than 48 hours to unlock all the points because it at least has 70,000 in quantity.

To full list of prizes with quantity is as follows:

Fusion Frenzy 2 (2500 units) Level 3 prize
T-Shirt (2500 units) Level 3 prize
200 Points (2500 units) Level 3 prize
100 Points (6000 units) Level 2 prize
Contra (70,000 units) Level 1,2,3 prize

Although this seemed like a great idea when initially announced a week ago, it’s really failed to live up to expectations. The Rewards website does hint at other reward programs coming in the future. So we can only hope Microsoft is busy taking notes at all the failures of this challenge and fixes them for next time.