[H]ere are some Top Tips that might help many players do much better:

Restart when your position is worse than when you started, which happens quite quickly if you don't make enough progress to compensate for module decay, and probably at once if you're attacked early.

Don't fight when you're not going to win, use the hide/hunt option to avoid crippling or fatal battles.

Don't guess passwords that your own fragment clue proves are wrong.

Use the...alliance rules, they give an immense advantage and are partly there to let middle-strength players catch the leaders.

Strong players benefit from having several weak helpers for scouting, weak players benefit from having a strong patron for information and cast-off modules. Both do well by sharing adventure information, since they're not after the same adventures. The game mechanisms are specifically set up to reward many forms of player interaction, take advantage of them.

There are still significant hidden aspects to the game, push into undocumented areas before someone else does.

[Editor's note: Although there aren't nearly as many undocumented areas in the game as there used to be, undiscovered or forgotten gems do still emerge from time to time. And there are many under-utilized features that can give clever and/or organized players significant advantages.]