I was thinking more about points and your position in the game

For instance, yours is 112/14066, while mine is.. well let's not talk about that

The points and ranking here don't seem to matter from what I've observed. If you are really wondering how you are ranked the Ghost Ratings are what you want to look at.

http://tournaments.webdiplomacy.net/theghost-ratingslist

Oh they matter to some.

Your "ranking" is really just your position out of all registered players on the site. The ranks are meaningless.

When you compare, you lose

I think "Rank" is based on your "position", which is just about points. If you play long enough or a lot, your points should gradually creep up, so some old-timers may have a good rank and position even if their play is only so-so. The win and draw percentages are probably a better measure of the skill of a player.

An even better measure can be those ghost ratings, http://tournaments.webdiplomacy.net/theghost-ratingslist , which take into account the caliber of the opposition as well, so a player doesn't get too much credit for just beating up on noobs. However, the ghost ratings strongly favor aggressive play, giving a lot more credit for wins than draws, so they tend to downplay the skill of cooperative players in favor of the cutthroat ones. That's a fair way to measure skill in the game, but certainly slants it towards the cutthroat philosophy, which is not the only way to view the game.

Since 1v1s win and draw rate became meaningless imo.

Sadly true @MrcsAurelius. I know there is a feature request to filter out those 1v1 games from the stats.

Two biggest factors that work against rankings in this game ... 1) Zultar points at Christmas (absoliutely ridiculous and which I appealed to kill) and 2) point values are different for each game ... ex. you could be highly ranked, bet all your points on 1 game and lose them which makes you a rookie again .... a better system would be like chess where games are a value based system depending on competition OR even if all games just have same value

kill zultar points at christmas though and you vastly improve the ranking system.. and don't have to rely on looking at ghost ratings

but to simply answer your question - the best way to improve is draw games / with occasional win ... and don't bet lots of points away that you can't afford to lose

Explain the Zultar points..?

@Wyatt: At Christmas, Zultar had point giveaways for fun.
@Bladrunner: Points were never a good measure of skill. Zultar's giveaways were not what ruined them. If you want a better measure of skill, check GR, as others have suggested. GR is far from perfect, from what I understand, but it's the best we have.