Need for Speed Unbound

I managed to get this, this morning (4th December 2022). I got invited to a group chat in the early hours of this morning and managed to get into a low capacity lobby, think about 6-7 people.

Simply set up an in-game party, (maximum capacity is 4 people) and invite some others or join one, and have another in-game party group gather people too and search to get into the same game.

Once this is done, someone that hosted an in-game party should set up a race. Everyone must join it quickly to prevent randoms getting in. You need to do 3 races for the playlist to get this.

The best advice I can give is to do this in the morning time (I’m BST time) because there are less people online on the game.

We managed to do it without any randoms coming in, thus preventing the chance of any randoms dropping because you won’t get it otherwise.

Feel free to comment what works or what doesn’t work for you. I found a lot of matchmaking issues occurred whilst doing it during the evening time.

Good luck!

I tested this and it works, i recommend this for the host of a Session.

Turning off the CrossPlay should put you on a server with only you or with enough space to invite other 7 people.

The game only accept a party of 4, so Invite 3, once they join, get out of the party, you and the rest will stay on the same server, that way you can invite 3 more people, get out and invite 1 more.

Alternative, one from the first party can invite 1 more, so the host only have to invite the other 3.

Another method, for those who want to try this Solo or with a groupd of less than 8.

There is a Public Event right now in Vol.3 called LinkUp, a lot of time you can find a good ammount of people participating. When the event finish a Cop Chase start and if you where waiting and start a playlist at that moment, they should enter.
Of course, if they know that If they enter a Playlist they escape from the police automatically, keeping the money from the UpLink.

Pick a B playlist, they are short and It is unlikely that some random bails out, because the LinkUp takes a couple of minutes to start again, so they will want to kill some time until the next event.

There's two ways to get this: Boosting this with 8 players or naturally getting it solo/in a smaller group. Both are fine but there's some things to take into consideration.

Boosting Method.
You are only able to be in a party of 4 so it will require a bit of coordination to get everyone into the same lobby. Games can have a maximum of 16 players, so you can turn cross play OFF to make it easier to find lower player count lobbies. You can factor in time of day as well, trying this during peak times might be more difficult. Once the first party of 4 are in a suitable game, hope the other party finds the same game or invite the other players, inviting through Xbox dashboard can be greyed out but having all 8 in an Xbox party chat and inviting that way should negate it, or have them join session in progress.

Once all in, have someone start an event and all join. If you've never played, an event is started at a meetup marked by the yellow circles with the black logos on the map. Ultimately the type of event doesn't matter as you have all the people anyway but you could concurrently help someone get a win in a certain type of tier event if that is required.

This method is harder to set up and requires a decent level of coordination but if everyone is a team player then it's a sure thing that you'll get this.

Solo/smaller group Method
I would turn cross play ON as there is a decent sized PC player base at the time of writing this. You're looking for highly populated servers with a majority of those people in free roam. Some players tend to sit in the garage for ages doing whatever so if you're in a lobby of 16 but 10 people are sitting there, then this will be difficult. Golden situation, you join a lobby and there's already a bunch of people racing so you can jump in with them, but a lot of the time, I was the one initiating the races. I have not experienced anyone leaving mid event either but take into account that can happen.

Something else to think about is the amount of players already in playlists which is shown in the top right when you open the map. If a lobby has a bunch of 2-3 player races going either find another lobby or try and coordinate to initiate the event when their races have finished so the maximum possible number of people in the lobby are available to accept. You need half of a full lobby to accept the race which sounds easy but take into account that's 15 people doing random stuff, it's unlikely they're all going to drop what they're doing to join a random race. To make it more enticing, I stuck to S+ tier events that were mainly street or speed races due to it being faster racing and usually more money.

As well, you don't wont to continuous initiate events then leave before they start if there aren't 8 players because let's say you had 6/8 people accept and then you leave, you've now put 5/16 of the lobby in a race. The best option is to start and keep the momentum going just continuously doing events. Now obviously, if there's only 1-2 people accepting then leave and just find other lobby. When I did this I jumped between lobbies until 5/8 accepted, completed the race then it was 7/8, 7/8 and finally 8/8 so it took 4 tries in a decent lobby. The multiplier for money goes up the more people are in, people will be more likely to jump in on a high player count playlist as the rewards are better and also the racing is more exciting.

My last bit of advice for doing this solo is put it on the backburner and just go for the Mixtape achievement for completing 25 lakeshore online playlists which is what I wish I did because as soon as I got this after trying, I had another 3 occurrences of having 8/8 people in a playlist and I still haven't even done 25 playlists yet.

This method relies on patience and some luck but is good because you'll be completing more events than the boost method and concurrently working towards other online achievements quicker.

To summarise
As of Jan 24 I would just do the solo/smaller group method and not even worry about boosting. Because you'll be working towards your 25 playlists/tier wins achievements as well as earning money to do your garage upgrades and buying 10 cars achievements anyway.
If you're reading this in a few years when this game is dead then the boosting method will be much better.

When I did it:

-Early hours so about 6-8am or early start for people to hop onto the game and play in whichever country you are from. (Most times should work hopefully)
-Make sure cross play is on, it does really matter what placement you place as long as its getting done and your not idling out yourself.
-pvp mode and have (including yourself) 8 random people join, join you join them, or have your own group hop in pvp mode and see if you can get a lobby.
-As long as the lobby has started with 8 people I believe it should be fine for you to get the achievement.


If still having some troubles, if getting people into a free mode lobby to join the races, then you can always try pvp mode, I was close to completing this a few times with free mode but was out of luck however, between 6-8 am UK time roughly I was reading some stuff on this achievement and decided to try pvp mode and found a random 8 person lobby, 1 race in 1 person left so went down to a 7 person lobby however it still counted and I unlocked the achievement. :) Hopefully this might help you to try pvp and see if its any better and getting a lobby then free mode.