Mountain Dew Halo 4 Double XP Promotion Review February 6, 2013

It’s no secret that one of the biggest promoters for many of the Halo games over the years has been Mountain Dew. It’s a green lime flavored soda which is actually caffeinated in a world where most lemon-lime sodas come without caffeine. Next to Bawls, I would probably consider it one of the most ubiquitous gamers drinks available, heck it’s even mentioned in the lyrics of Jonathan Coulton’s hit song “Code Monkey”. So Mountain Dew and games have quite a special relationship going on, and that relationship was strengthened with the release of Halo 4 and Mountain Dew’s newest promotion for it, the Double XP Giveaway.

For the release of Halo 4, Microsoft and Mountain Dew ran a very special cross promotion. Halo 4 players who purchased specially marked Mountain Dew products could find a code inside of the package which can be redeemed online and grant the soda drinker a predetermined amount of multiplayer matches where they could double the amount of xp they would normally earn when playing mutliplayer in Halo 4. The great thing was that there was a pretty wide selection of different versions of the soda that would have codes on it. You weren’t limited to just buying a 20oz bottle from 7-11, they had codes in 2 litre bottles and 12 pack cases as well. Branded sodas with double xp codes in them were very easy to find, they would have the Master Chief’s picture clearly displayed on them.

Code redemption was pretty easy for the most part. You could find a code under a bottle cap for a plastic bottle or printed on the inside of the case for a 12-pack. So long as your parents didn’t throw the packages out before you redeemed the code, they could be redeemed really quickly. You could then redeem the code on their Official Website, dewxp.com from a smartphone or personal computer. You would just need to log in through Facebook or create a Mountain Dew account before redeeming the codes. It was great to have a mobile specific site set up, because some times people will just pick up a 20oz soda on the go and prefer to throw out the empty bottle and cap before they get home to redeem the code. By having a mobile site, you could redeem the code as you’re drinking the soda from anywhere and toss it out when you’re done. The codes were pretty easy to read off the packages as well, which made redeeming them pretty simple.

However, it wasn’t enough to just redeem your codes online and play, there was an extra step to it. For that, you would need to be accessing the site from a personal computer or laptop. Once you visited the site from a normal computer, you would need to log into your Dew XP account, and link your Xbox Live Account to the site. Since the days of Halo 2, Xbox Live accounts are linked with Microsoft’s Live system, which uses the same email address and password you can use other Microsoft programs with like Messenger or Games for Windows. Once you were logged into Live through the Dew XP site, you could then redeem as many of the Double XP matches you had banked to Xbox Live. Since the accounts were not permanently locked, you could redeem double xp matches on multiple Xbox Live accounts, so long as you knew the username and password to the Live account it was tied to. Once the matches were applied to Xbox Live, you could pick up and play Halo 4 and automatically your multiplayer matches would start awarding you double xp.

There were prize giveaways with the promotion as well, with each code redemption you would earn a few double xp matches banked to your Dew account, as well as a token to redeem for a chance to win a prize. It worked like a raffle, and the more codes you redeemed the more tickets you could put in and the better chances you could get in winning what you wanted. Some of the giveaways were for stuff the players could already have, like a copy of Halo 4, but since players could enter into drawings for only the specific prizes that they wanted, they wouldn’t have to worry about winning something they weren’t interested in.

As you can tell from this description, I had a few issues with this promotion. The first off was that double xp matches were limited only to War Games matches. That meant that they would not count for players who were only interested in playing Spartan Ops, which also earns xp for a player’s multiplayer avatar in Halo 4. I think this has something to do with War Games offering a more varied amount of xp per match based upon a player’s merits, and they might have been concerned that people would use the matches on Spartan Ops, play on Legendary, and break the game’s balance by earning way more xp than they would have otherwise. Still, for someone who prefers to play Spartan Ops over War Games, this was a little disappointing.

And please don’t get me started on Dew’s Official Double XP Site.

First off, I’m going to talk about the interface. It wasn’t very well designed and it lacked a lot of options that other sites will provide their users. For example, all double xp redeemers need to register an account with e-mail address. If you had participated in a Mountain Dew or Pepsi promotion in the past few years, in all likelihood you already had an account active that you just didn’t know about. If you can’t remember your password, you will just need to reset it. If you don’t like your password and want to change it, you can’t change it manually through the site, it still needed to be reset first. I didn’t like that for a few reasons. Most sites do offer users the ability to update their passwords or change them for security purposes. The user can be verified either by inputting their old password first or input a personal bit of information, like date of birth. Instead, there is no option for password change in any of the menus. There is just a link to click if you “forgot your password”, which if you click it, automatically invalidates your current password and fires you off an email with a new randomly generated one, which you can then change at your leisure. While it gets the job done (so long as your ISP didn’t confuse the password reset email for spam), it could have been done better. You also needed to take it upon yourself to make sure that all the personal information Dew had was still up to date, like mailing information, in case you won a prize.

The worst part was the site was broken quite a lot. I remember visiting it many times over the last fifteen days of the promotion. The reason why I would be visiting it that much was because I couldn’t link my Xbox Live Account to the site for some reason, and every day I had to keep trying and trying to link my already banked double xp. There is no excuse for having a promotion that fails at doing exactly what it is designed for. I understand that I was having issues over the last few weeks of the promotion, but the site should be fully operational the entire duration of the promotion. I can understand a site having an occassional hiccup, but there is no excuse if I am returning to a site daily for two weeks, and being denied access to essential features every day due to bad web design. Two days before the promotion wrapped up, the site became so unstable it would not allow me to redeem a code I had which was good for six matches. In fact, I was not able to redeem that code until the final day of the promotion.

What was especially disheartening about these issues was that there was a time limit on the promotion. Codes could not be redeemed on the site after January 31st, 2013, and if the codes weren’t banked and the matches weren’t used by that time, they would be phased out. It’s really tough to meet those deadlines if the site is broken and will not allow a user to redeem their codes leading up to the end of the promotion! On the final day was I finally able to redeem the last of my double xp codes and properly link all of my outstanding matches to my Xbox Live account. On that day I had eighteen matches I believed I needed to play in less than twelve hours or I would lose all the double xp matches I had earned over weeks of drinking Mountain Dew. I was able to do it, but it took a lot of Mountain Dew. In case you’re wondering, I won fifteen out of those eighteen matches. I’m pretty proud of that.

Now that the 31st of January has passed the promotion is over, and Mountain Dew has adjusted their previous policy. I have no idea if this has something to do with the issues that I was having on the final few weeks of the promotion, but I believe it does. While players are still no longer able to redeem double xp codes online, any matches that have already been banked on your Mountain Dew account can be applied to your Xbox Live account between now and March 31st, 2013. They also said that any outstanding double xp matches players have already banked on their Live accounts will still earn double xp until that day. So, they gave players a bit of an extension and the possibility for more double xp matches.

My issues with the promotion aside, I’m happy that Mountain Dew threw this promotion. It’s always nice when video games get some kind of cross promotional event with common products that gamers would like. I’ve always maintained that these kinds of promotions add a bit of legitimacy to gaming, as they can expose non gamers (like people who just like drinking Mountain Dew) to games. I mean, the same thing happens with movies all the time, and its nice that this is happening with gaming.

Just make a different site next time, Mountain Dew.