Quote:No, you are incorrectly conflating ladders and zero sum.
There is already a ladder, flawed though it may be. It is stopped from having runaway inflation by decay over time. It features relative rather then absolute rankings, and rewards players for killing based on the size group you do it with, the position of the killed player on the ladder, the health the player had at the start of the battle, and level. All this is aready in the game, so proposing a system with these features isn't saying anything new unless you say how you would do it differently.
Some of these features could use tweaks, but I think most logical people would agree that most of them are necessary in some form. For example, without the much detested decay feature, eventually the entire horde would be all warlords and no grunts.
The addition of a zero sum system to all of this simply means that there will have to be some sort of CP penalty attached to dieing and losing. The question is would this be more or less fun.
In particular, this eliminates any chance of an epic, "storm the battlements" type Battleground.
In addition
Protect him? Or kick him in favor of a less squishy healer.
I suppose my terminology was wrong, rather than "ladder" I should have been thinking "skill ranking system". Such as chess uses.
If "fun" is "developing skill in a game and being rewarded for your skill" then zero-sum CP is more fun than just being able to grind CP.
Positive-sum CP means rank rises mostly by time spent (grinding). Every encounter for anyone produces on the average some CP, so you can just spend enormous quantities of time to get to the top, as long as you are at least of middling skill.
Zero-sum CP means rank rises mostly by skill developed (or it should if your ladder system is reasonable.)
This would let casual players have a chance, because everybody would eventually be ranked by their skill level; casual players would just take longer to get there. (And of course, they would probably have less skill due to less time spent playing, but that's fair.)
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I don't see why storming the battlements shouldn't be done in zero-sum CP (or other skill-ranking system.)
If storming is harder than defending, the encounter will reward a successful offense more than a successful defense.
Yes, your expected overall gain from a given battle is zero (after everybody has bubbled to their "true" ranking by skill level). But, the real reward in playing a game ought to be feeling that you are becoming more skilled at it. That's what play is - it's the practice of skills. As your skill is increasing, each battle should reward you slightly. That's a good feeling.
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Maybe players really just do want a system where they put X hours in and get reward Y out. In my opinion, that's not play, it's work, but to each their own.
[Edit: It occurs to me that WSG, AV, and AB already offer a good grind for their respective reps. So players who want to PvP and grind at the same time, would still have the option, even in a skill-ranking system.]