Most Hot Pursuit races will be scored on the Basic Scoring Table, although in all Pursuit race scoring, points are awarded based on Placement minus Tickets, so that 1st place with 2 tickets is awarded points for 3rd place.  Special "Demolition Hot Pursuit" scoring applies when the following requirements are met:  2 or 3 racers in the pit, Hot Pursuit Mode, Collision ON, Night ON, Weather ON, no raceway type tracks (Raceway, Raceway 2,Raceway 3, Autumn Valley, Lost Vegas, Proving Grounds, Thunder Mountain, Puntarenas Speedpark, San Jose Speed Complex, Tarbaca High Speed Raceway), and no tracks where cops do not work right (Autobahn, Burgstrasse, Norwegen).   On top of any lap multiplier, DHP scoring uses a Car Class multiplier: AAA = 1X   AA = 2X   A = 3X and B = 4X.  Note that if any player gets arrested in a Pursuit race, the race does not finish and cannot be scored.  Also note that DHP scoring does not apply for B+, A+ AA+, AAA+ or CART classes.

Your total rating is derived by adding together 10 factors which are designed to fairly rate your mastery of the many skills that are demanded by the High Stakes game.  To acheive a good rating, you will need to turn in good times and high speeds relative to the other racers who are scored here.  In addition, you will need to maximize your points/races ratio as well as placement in all types of races, and should try to race as many different race combinations as you can.  A high rating here is earned through hard work!  Below are the details of the ten rating factors:

Average Points per Race

This is the only rating factor which is derived from the points system.  This factor can be inflated by placing well in 8 lap races and DHP races, but only if you do it often.  Theoretically, the range of this factor is 1 to 32.

Singles, Knockout, Tournament and Pursuit Ratings

These factors are based on average race placement in each of the 4 racing modes. Winning all your races in any mode would give 10 for that mode's rating factor.  Each of these 4 factors has a range of 0 to 10.  Also note that for the Knockout rating, all truck races are excluded, and for the Pursuit rating tickets are subtracted from placement before averaging.

Time, Lap, Speed and Weather Ratings

The scoring system saves your best total time, best lap time, and highest speed for every combination of Car Class, Track, and Weather condition.  Any time any one of these gets beaten, that factor is updated.  In each of these areas, your time or speed is compared against the fastest record anyone has saved and the slowest record anyone has saved for that combination.  The closer you are to the fastest time, the higher your "Subrating" for that combination, up to 10 if you hold that particular record.  Of course, if your time is the site worst, you get 0 for that Subrating.  To get the Time Rating, all Time Subratings (with Weather OFF) are averaged.  Same with the Lap and Speed Ratings.  For the Weather Rating, all Time, Lap and Speed Subratings are averaged together for Weather ON records.  Note that combinations not yet run do not count against you, only completed records are used in the averaging.  One race with Weather OFF and one race with Weather ON will establish all four of these ratings.  Each of these factors ranges 0 to 10.

Diversity Rating

The scoring system counts how many different kinds of races you run, and awards you 1/100 of a point for each unique combination you run.  With 4 Modes, 31 Cars, 39 Tracks, 32 ways to run each (5 options including Traffic), 3 Lap Options, Assists On or Off, and Collision, we have 1,228,800 possible combinations, so technically the range of this factor is 0 - 12,288.  It will be interesting to see how high anyone can take this factor.

Over the years, we have added some other nifty things to the site to increase the fun factor a bit:

Circuit Races

Circuits are essentially tournaments within a defined timeframe where each racer's best time for each defined race is maintained, and each race in the circuit is aggregated among everyone who runs that race within the timeframe.  So essentally, each race in the circuit is a giant race amongst all participants.  Players can improve their times by running the races as many times as they want during the timeframe.  Circuit races can be Stock Only, EP Only, or Both, scored as seperate circuits.  The types of Circuit Races are:

Dynamic - A series of 6 races, configured any way the circuit host wishes.
Knockout - A giant Knockout series among all participants.
Tournament - A giant Tourmament series among all participants.
DHP - A series of 6 DHP races, configured within the constraints of DHP scoring.

Annual Stats

During the life of this site, there has been an ongoing debate between occasional resets of the stats versus continual maintenance of stats.  Ultimately, a compromise was reached in which we maintain fresh stats for each calendar year, while still maintianing an all-time records area.  When you first visit the site, you are presented with the current year's stats.  You can choose to view stats for any year (or All Years) by clicking that year in the top navigation bar, and as long as you enable cookies for this site, this choice should "stick" as you browse amongst the stats pages.  Note that the year only applies to Basic Stats, Advanced Stock, Advanced Stats, and Persona Stats. 

The main pages on this site should be self-explanatory, with graduating levels of complexity. We hope you find this site easy to navagate and to use.  You may notice some times and speeds are displayed in different colors:  GREEN indicates a site record for a particular class, YELLOW indicates an individual's personal best and RED indicates a "site worst record".

There is a single installation pack needed to update NFS High Stakes directly from your CD-ROM to be able to properly race online with the Collision Off option. The NFS High Stakes STOCK PACK Installer (3MB) includes patches to ensure a smooth online experience, and also includes all the key patches to get the game working on Windows XP and newer hardware. It is strongly recommended that you also read the NFS HS Online Racing Guide for step-by-step installation instructions and lots of troubleshooting tips.

The High Stakes Expansion Pack (EP for short) can also be used to expand your game. It contains everything that the Stock Pack has, plus an amazing assortment of hand-picked cars and tracks from among the many user-modified/created cars and tracks for High Stakes, available from many download sites.  IP Lounge and this database have been customized to integrate and include these tracks and cars for official Online racing and scoring within this system. The design of High Stakes is such that to accomplish this, tracks must replace original tracks in the game in order to be available.  These extra tracks and cars are not meant to REPLACE anything in the original game.  The sole intent is to expand the game to include an often overlooked aspect of the history of the Need for Speed series of games, and to increase the fun factor and diversity a bit.  In addition to these add-ons, the Expansion Pack includes the IP Lounge, the NFS HS Mixer (customized for this Pack and IP Lounge), the No Collision Patch, the No-CD patch (requires copying some files from the CD to the game folder) and some custom game menus.  This EP is the product of thousands of hours of work by High Stakes racers for the love of the game, it is totally free, and you can DOWNLOAD IT HERE(120MB)

This scoring system has been designed in such a way that having this EP or not having it offers no advantage or disadvantage, except a slight advantage in the area of diversity with the EP.  Special car classes have been used within the scoring system so that EP cars are never rated against cars from the Stock game, with one exception: the Bonus Porsche is treated as an EP car, thereby preventing this one car from dominating the AA class, and enhancing diversity in AA and AA+ classes.  The three EP classes are AAA+, AA+ and CART class.  When EP cars are enabled, AAA+ show up as AAA class, AA+ as AA class, and CART class cars will appear as B Class cars.  This is mainly so that in AAA class, a host can set up a challenge of racing AAA cars against AAA+ bots (AI cars), without racers having to face the much faster CART cars as bots.

Please be aware that we do not allow any cars and tracks besides those in the the Stock game and official Expansion Pack.  Loading any other mod cars or tracks is unfair to your fellow racers and can only serve to make enemies among the racing community.  Please everyone stick to the approved cars and tracks when racing online for scoring with IPL and HOSS.  Eventually, we will have cheat-checks in place such that anyone racing with unapproved cars or tracks will be excluded from scoring.  Until then, we can only trust our fellow racers to play fair.  We are all here to have fun!!

If you want to see some of the Replays done by other racers in order to help improve your game skills, check out our REPLAY AND GHOST LIBRARY.  Most of these work with Default Tracks enabled, with Stock Cars, although more and more of them are requiring the Expansion Pack.  Be sure to check the Readme file for the Replay or Ghost in order to find out what setup is required.