You have to have a pretty even mix of activities to keep a decent ranking although, as noted, just because someone has a high ranking doesn't mean he's all that much better than you.
Same goes the other way around. I remember being shocked a few years ago when Greebo seemed to be cleaning my clock fairly regularly in his F6. I went to check his stats and saw he was rated something like 5000(???). Looking closer I could see he was always flying in Attack mode so he scores didn't average out right.
So, you need to do a good mix of things to get a decent score. That can be problematic when you don't like to do things like bomber runs. Takes too much effort for me, those b24 runs, but I'll do them on occasion if only to get a bump in my score.
That said, I don't really care too much about my rankings anymore. I pay more attention to my stats, like kills per hour, hit percentage and such. Still, if I feel I've been doing pretty good and I see my ranking is like 3 or 4 hundred, I might just take the time to do a bomb run. Since I don't bomb often, if at all, I've found just one bomb run can raise my ranking from 500 down to 300, at least for a day or so.
But, like I've said, I've paid less and less attention to my rankings and pretty much try to play the game as I want to now. I've even gotten to the point where I'll regularly bail out of a plane if there's no action where I'm at and I don't have the patience to land. Never used to do that much before because I didn't want to screw up my score (although I'm not sure just how that affects score: bailing, I mean).
So, if any of you see me dump a plane for no apparent reason, it's usually because I'm too impatient to hassle with landing.
Oh, and for what it's worth, I nearly always prefer defending as opposed to attacking, although I'll do either depending on the circumstances.
