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You will find some torrents are much more active than others. Pay attention to date the offer was made, and the total seeders and total leechers. For example, an obscure torrent from 2006 with 40 seeders & 0 leechers will take quite some time to make a good ratio. An anime with a well-recognized name (ex. Castle in the Sky) will attract a pretty steady stream of downloaders, so if you see 40 or 60 seeders and 6 or 15 leechers, you'll tend to make ratio back faster.
Catch a new offer, especially with reputation as a good one, and you'll easily see 300 or 500 leechers, who will mostly become seeders fast. If you're one of the first, you can hit a 20:1 ratio quickly in the first week or two, maybe even better if you have a fantastic connection.
When you download a large torrent (8 GB or 15 GB or 26 GB), it's important to run that torrent to the highest ratio you can ... it will weight your ratio toward the higher number so you can several DL smaller torrents that might be harder to get ratio on.
Since you're already at 5+ ratio, you're off to a great start. If possible, try not to retire any torrent before 5:1. Then, when you sometimes stop at smaller ratios, your overall will be at least 3:1 or something like that. I'm fortunate with my current bandwidth (and no caps), so I use 10:1 as my mark; often I retire torrents only when they exceed 12:1 or more. Instead of the green ratio number, I watch the black "absolute" ratio under it ... therefore always error in my favor instead of against me. I'm banking against the day when my bandwidth isn't so good. I'll be able to D/L a full terabyte and still have a ratio around 8:1.
Also, a lot of people will tell you I'm crazy to care about anything over 1:1. They might be right.
