The Crew

The matchmaking in this game is dire and after having spent 4 hours trying to get into a public PVP lobby in an attempt to get this achievement, after finally getting to work as a team, we decided "someone" should write a solution to help others on TA.

The following is what worked for us as a team of 8.

After trying many different ways of searching for each other in the public PVP lobby, all without success, we tried getting the achievement in a private lobby instead. (This does not work, but may have helped match us later).

Here are the steps we took.....

First off we got 2 people into a private lobby, then invited in the other members of the party, so all 8 of us were in the lobby.

Next we arranged ourselves into crews, then made sure that each crew was on the same colour team.

We tried a couple of races to see if we could get the achievement in the private lobby, but that didn't work, so we quit out and returned to the map.

This is probably the most vital element

The game returned all of us the to the same PVP location on the map, so we could all see each other's names, although the cars were invisible for some.

We then tried to search for a public game and got into a lobby straight away. Instantly, no waiting, no count down timer, immediately.

We completed a race making sure that we met the finish 1,2,3 conditions, but to be extra safe we finished 1,2,3,4 and also made sure that the losing team finished so there were no dnf's.

After both teams had gotten the achievement, which pops at the race results screen, we backed out of the lobby and tried entering again to test the method and again were instantly pulled into the Public PVP lobby.

So it seems the important thing is, to all be at the same PVP location, in 2 crews of 4.

Extra Notes
I think the 4 vs 4 is important, I had tried being at the same location in a previous 3 vs 3 session, but that did not work.

Before getting it to work, we had tried searching as 4 x 2 player crews, searching as 2 x4 player crews, searching individually, making sure each crew belonged to the same faction, different PVP locations, nothing seemed to matter or work, until we went through the process mentioned above.

As I say the important thing is probably to be in the same location, but we did feel that maybe as we had just all been matched up in a private lobby first, maybe that had helped the game match us again, but we weren't sure, so I've added in all our steps, just in case.

Hopefully that sheds some light on this and help's others get the achievement easily, although no doubt it will lower it's ratio, the fact our success could save many hours of others peoples time, it had to be worth writing a detailed solution.

Good Luck and thanks to the other members of the session, who deserve credit for this solution as well

Hayz7890
IanK1987 (extra proof reading credit)
se7ense7ensR49
WAFFLETRAIN7997
MarekVit
ODYsseyGrimwall
Slimypickel4

The first step to this achievement is to start a crew with at least 3 players and have everyone pick the same faction from the five factions available; The Wolves, The Eagles, The Crocodiles, The Snakes & The Bears. Note: you can change to a different faction at any time but this will result in the reset of your reputation and faction stats for your current faction, and there is also a 7 day waiting time to be able to switch between factions.

Once all players are in the same faction AND crew, you should now choose any PvP event from the map, select Play > Public > Faction vs Faction and the game will attempt to find a lobby with opponents in the same faction as you are. This is extremely luck based and will take some time as not a lot of people play PvP, let alone as a faction therefore once you do finally find a lobby, your crew will need to take the first three spots at the end of the race for this achievement, therefore you should only attempt this when everyone in the crew have high levelled up cars for the best chance.

I understand there are 5 other guides. Most of the time I would not write ANOTHER solution at that point, but I was requested for clarification and from someone who isn't a native English speaker to write up how I got this achievement most efficiently. This was originally a TA PM however I've just slightly adapted it to a solution.
I hope this helps someone with some of my ideas! **Warrz98 gets some credit, and the other solution authors for their work.

I'm going to give you a run-down of how to get this achievement from my perspective. I'll try to be as clear as possible!

The BIG problem is getting into a lobby in order to qualify for the achievement! The steps below explain how to do so.

1. You MUST have 8 people.
I recommend BACKUPS!! Because every time I tried for this someone didn't show up.
2. Everyone add each other as friends BEFORE the session. I recommend everyone hard reset their console/router/internet if AT ALL POSSIBLE.

3. Try to get online in The Crew 10 minutes ahead of time to allow the games servers to start recognizing the other people in the session as being online in the game.
4. Choose a PvP location on the map where you expect fewer random people will be in the area at the time. I personally used Seattle.
5. Have everyone online, in a party--chat is not required as long as people can:
---A. follow messages
---B. Understand what's happening
---C. Accept game invites!
Figure out who else you can understand easily and can understand you easily--use them as other crew leaders and have them help with the inviting stages!!

6. Start gathering everyone into a private PvP lobby. You do not have to start a race, but this will indicate whether you can have success. Pick someone who has a good connection and preferably Open NAT.
7. Once that person has started a lobby, and starts inviting other people, there are a few tricks to get everyone in the lobby:
---A. Xbox Live Party invites to the game
---B. In-game friend game invites
---C. in-game crew invites.. which should allow you to invite someone that's in your crew to the lobby
---D. Some people might appear offline to random other people in the session and party--that is ok, as long as whoever sees them online invites them to the lobby.
8. Keep trying until you get all the cars and people in the private PvP lobby. If you do not get this step done--if it looks like one person is having trouble connecting, consider replacing them with a backup! Or, have them do a quick hard reset, reconnect and see if they can join.

9. If you succeed in step 8, you are very close!!!!

10. Now, have everyone get into 2 crews of 4 while in the private PvP lobby. You might have to try a few times to get it all organized and ready.
11. Once you have 2 crews of 4, everyone leave the lobby at the same time!

12. Look around in the Crew world, and look for names of random people's gamertag's. The crew leaders at this point need to be communicating very well! If both crews have random people in their Crew world, make another lobby and repeat. If that doesn't work, split up and have the 2 crews of 4 join and leave PvP lobbies until there are NO randoms in one of the worlds.
13. If one crew has NO random gamertags in their world, you need to do the next steps as fast as you can!
14. The crew in the empty world needs to split into 2 crews of 2 as fast as possible.
15. Now, the 2 crews are going to invite the 4 other people into the 2 new crews. MAKE SURE YOU DO NOT INVITE MORE THAN 1 PERSON AT A TIME! You need to make sure you are bringing people INTO your game session world, not being dragged out of your game session world because you've invited too many people and their session drags you along. This is why you only invite when you have a crew of 2, and invite ONE person at a time so your crew will bring them into your session.
16. If you've done that right, you should now have 2 crews of 4, in the same game session world! With no randoms!!

17. Now, have one crew start searching the PvP lobby, and the other crew start searching about 10-15 seconds later.
18. If this does not work after a couple tries(don't wait longer than 30 seconds!), have one crew restart their search a few times. If that does not work, it's time to do what worked for us finally.

19. Do this carefully--I'm going to call the crews A, B, and C. Crew A's leader leaves his crew, and then invites 2 of crew B and one of crew A into a new 4 person Crew C.
Crew B's leader stays with his crew, and invites the two people left over from Crew A into Crew B.
You should now have 2 new 4 person Crews.

20. Try searching right away again using the 10-15 second delay before the 2nd crew searches.
21. If that doesn't work, mix the crews up again by splitting and forming new crews and try again!
22. I never needed step 21. :-)

DO NOT LEAVE THE LOBBY BETWEEN RACES!!

Now that you have your lobby, you simply need to do a race and have one team finish first then switch teams. I believe all 4 on a team get the achievement even though it only says 1st, 2nd, and 3rd--but if not, it's easy enough to just do another race for those who didn't get it, switching teams as necessary.
Choose Race, Dirt, Big Sur(Sprint) for the fastest one that I know of. Someone please correct me if I named this one incorrectly from memory!

A good note from Mikasz! The lobby has a countdown. You must have an even number of players in the lobby otherwise you will all be kicked out to the world map! So if you are switching players for the achievement, do it quickly before the countdown is down.

Hope this helps and makes sense! It's long, but I like to be thorough especially with annoying achievements!

UPDATE: According to EmG v SprayZz 's personal experience and assertion, the matchmaking works best on Saturdays, if you check the recent winners, there's a three-week streak of the achievement being unlocked during the Saturday and nothing in between. Although there's one person who unlocked the achievement on Tuesday (2nd of Jan), might as well be worth trying setting up a session on Saturday, but beware that the time zones are different for all people, so when it might be Saturday for "you", might be still Friday or already Sunday for someone else, so bear this in mind when you're setting up the session.

Original solution:
As a recent winner, I have something to add to the previous solutions as they’re quite old and don’t work for a lot of people.

So we spent 5 hours in my latest session trying to match up with each other, and we've figured out some working methods on how to end up in the same server room for all 8 people.

First, there’s advice from the previous guides that is always important, mostly for convenience than anything else. Add everyone who’s in your session to a friends list, all of the people in the session should do that because every single person might need that later.

After you know for sure that everyone has added everyone, pick a location with a PvP lobby, agree on that one, and teleport there altogether. Once that is done, open the map, and browse through it, you all should see the rest of your session members in the same area highlighted with green color on the map.

UPDATE: If the solution provided down below won't work, try the following:
Use the private lobby method from other guides, but when you get back into FreeDrive, continue with my solution, starting from the point when you select people who are in the same room (can see each other cars) and will invite others into their crews to pull in people. To start this, you might need one person to get out of the existing 4 player crew, so figure out the person who can leave the crew, but remain in the same server room and see the members of the crew he just left. The person who's able to do that will be the one to start gathering his crew of 4. Next, follow along with the guide.

Back to the original solution:
Go back from the map to the FreeDrive and wait for a good few minutes driving around. Now, ideally, what happens, is you’re being split into two server rooms (in worse scenarios three or more rooms), where you can start seeing each other. At this point, you need to communicate with your session members to determine who sees who. What you want to do is assign at least two people in the same room who will start inviting others into their crews.

Here's where the "adding to friends" part comes in as it makes the invitation process easier. Invites to crew have to be sent individually via the Quick Snap menu (Right Stick click ), no one ever should send an invite to the whole group via Xbox Party, that’ll only mix up the server rooms and even possibly make compatibility between players broken.

So again, you have two people in the same room, they need to start INDIVIDUALLY inviting people from other rooms into their crews, communicate, decide who should invite whom, and never invite the same person more than once into any crew.

This pulls person by person into your server room, so eventually you’ll end up having 2 crews, all four players, and both in the same server room.

Now there’s a slight catch:
1) Some people just can’t invite others and just get a server error. This is bad and it means you have to pick other two people in the same room to get the job done.
2) Some people can’t join crews as the game tries to get them in but kicks them after a while. In this case, for crew leader, you have to kick this person from a crew if he appeared as added, although he’s not. If he’s not appearing as added to the crew then you don't have to do anything. For the person getting the error when joining, go to the dashboard and quit the game process (press while the game is highlighted on the dash and select Quit), relaunch the game, and, spawn in the world and wait until your friends start appearing online, this is important to wait for that as otherwise you’ll continue getting the error as before. Once the person has his friends online, the crew leader has to invite him once again, and most likely he’ll join with no issues.
3) If the proposed fix isn’t working for issue number 2, try either swap people between crews and inviting the troubled person to the opposite crew (so the inviting crew leader is a different person), or try changing a CrewMaster (aka crew leader) and invite from his side. If nothing helps, I’m afraid you’re not compatible with this person and you have to find a backup person.
4) Everyone, literally everyone in the session, try avoiding going to the Dashboard and don't even call the guide menu, for some reason game doesn't like this and can easily decide to put you into another server room even if you're already hanging with your crew.

After you’re all in the same server room and are in the 2 crews of four, once more, make sure you’re seeing each other properly, then start looking for a public crew vs crew event in a lobby that’s located nearby (you should’ve picked one to teleport to early throughout this guide). The game should be found in under a minute, if not, you all should start following this guide from scratch until it works. This is the way my session got the achievement, this method wasn’t mentioned anywhere, so we had to figure it out on our own and we matched in a PvP lobby on our second try of gathering together in the same room.

The general idea is to mix and match people to get into the 2 crews of four in the same room, by causing the other people to be pulled into your room when they join your crew invitation.

Good luck everyone, I hope this guide helps you to save time and that it’ll work.

Since some people have asked me how we got the achievement, here is a guide of how we boosted it.
First of all, it took as a while, around 2,5-3 hours. We had to figure out a lot, since other guides are from a while back. We were the first (group) in June 2016 to get this achievement.

What you need to know in preperation
- Our group had 3 NA & 5 EU players, so this should not be an issue.
- Everyone needs to be lvl 10 or above, recommended lvl is 50.
- Reset router & hard reset xbox. Everyone has to do this. This was one of our magic tricks.
- Also make sure that everyone has each other as friends, it makes things easier to invite.
- We were not sure if the faction were a factor, a lot of us were in different factions. It is recommended to have your crew leaders in the same faction.

Session
- Start a private lobby with everyone (crew vs crew).
- You will be divided in 2 crews, select from these crews, 2 crew leaders.
- These crew leaders will invite their crew to a real crew.
- Now leave the lobby. We ended up once in a different city and once in the same city. When we were in the same city, the crews weren't able to see each other (probably on different servers).
- Both crew leaders start at the same time.
- Now one group resets the search once in a while. This was our other magic trick.

When you find each other there is no need to leave the lobby after the first run. You can simple start again. Make sure to let everyone select the same race/game which you prefer.

If you have anything to add to this 'solution', please comment in the section below.

Special thanks to Sighris, Ray Jerkings, Kimitchii, Riconoclast, T1TANMONKEY, Tao Logos & Tucky90.

so I recently completed this achievement with a lot of trial and error. my group followed many guides but nothing seemed to work. we had a few issues. the first being we could get everyone in the same world by doing a private match but they would drop out as soon as we started searching for a public game. first off everyone will need to have everyone as a friend over xbox. this makes it immensely easier. now as of crew factions, a lot of guides say you have to be in the same crew (wolves, crocodiles ect.) this is not true the crew they are talking about in terms of finishing is red and blue teams.

so the solution for getting into the same world is easier done than said. I will call it pulling for this purpose, so you will want 2 crew leaders with a full crew. (this might be an issue because people don't appear always when you press right stick. just be patient)

one person in Crew A will leave his crew (press right stick then a on your name and press the leave crew option) and start inviting other players from Crew B. this will pull them from their server into yours. so at this point you should see your old crew (3 green names) and one person who is currently in your crew (1 orange name) don't worry if you cant see the cars as long as you see the names you're fine. continue pulling people into your game. now the reason everyone needs to be friends is because not everyone will appear online over the game menu. but will appear online for some other players. so another player can pull players that you cannot. sometimes when no one can pull players you can also send an invite over their xbox live gamertag invite to game option. so once all 8 people (in 2 groups of 4) are in the same server and location you can begin matchmaking. now there is a trick to this. after 2 hours of trying this we finally got it (props to Col Pacman) for figuring this out. when people start a crew vs crew match at the same time it starts 2 new lobbies. at this point your matchmaking for both Crew A and B is trying to find players to put in your game, but it cant read because it registers both crews as busy looking for other players. so the trick is to have Crew A search and Crew b wait 10 seconds before they start their search. this worked instantly for us.

now for the actual racing part. you will be separated into red team and blue team. one team finishes 1st -4th then the other team can finish. I say this because I got 4th place and still got the achievement so this way you only have to race 2 times just in case servers decide to stop working.

so here are the steps broken down.
1. be in the same location on the map (we used Chicago)
2. get into 2 crews of 4
3. start pulling players
4. re establish 2 groups of 4 but there should be 8 people all in the same server now
5. Crew A starts searching
6.Crew B starts searching 10 seconds later
7.select battle at big sur (sprint) which is race (arrow with flag) dirt spec, and it should be the last race (this is the fastest race to do)
8. Complete race with blue or red team all finishing 1st throughout 4th
9. Complete race second time for remaining players
*10. sometimes the achievement wont unlock for someone after they have met the requirements. so check if the in game award unlocked for you. press right stick while in the lobby and it will be under pvp A and second row first column. if it says that you have won it then just hard reset your xbox and the achievement will pop the next time you launch your game.
props to my gaming session that helped me get the science of pulling down and props to Col Pacman for figuring out the biggest issue of all (Wax Tailor, ThriftyJam77169, SG xJuggernaut, OntyParad0x, Killionaire119, FJmontero1, Col Pacman)

edit: this achievement is very tricky, some tricks work and others don't. here is how shadow 00 fox did it
We found what might be an incredibly important trick!!
1. We got everyone into a private lobby first to make groups of 4
2. We left the lobby and checked to see who had NO RANDOMS in their server.
3. We invited everyone into the server that had no randoms by splitting up the crews making sure the good server always had a majority in the crew before inviting others into it!
4. Then, after trying searching a few times, here's the trick!
5. We've swapped crews around, by switching 1-2 people between each crew, and forming a 3rd new crew of 4.... like this: We had two crews of AAAA and BBBB. Our new crews were now Crew C with AABB in it, and Crew B with AABB in it. Both times, we immediately got into a PvP lobby!!!!!!!!

Just a quick addition to say that PvP is not unlocked at the start of the game, you must progress in the story to unlock PvP.

Some hosts fail to mention this in their session notes so those just starting the game and looking to boost the online can be caught out.

Edit: I unlocked PVP by playing up until Chicago unlocks and then flying over to New York and buying the Dirt ready 4X4/pick up truck from the New York Car Dealer.

and you need to be level 10.