I notice that some people use the terms 'scoring system' and 'rating system' interchangeably. They are not synonymous. A scoring system is used to determine the performance of players in specific games, while a rating system is used to determine the skill of players across multiple games. A scoring system can exist without a rating system, but not vice versa.
@G-Man "I disagree with Mercy on surviving. A 1-supply center draw is waaay better than a 16-supply center survive. Surviving is meaningless." I think you misunderstood me. I was saying that you cannot give objective arguments that a draw is always better than a survival if there is no scoring system backing this up. Without a scoring system, all you can use as your argument is the subjective 'This is how the game should be played'. Other people will have a different, subjective view of it and the result will be a game where players play according to different goals, and hence rules, which leads to frustration for all. Hence the need for a proper scoring system.
@Oli worded this quite well in his response. I disagree with Oli's assertion that PPSC players are less serious players, though. They often are indeed, but I think this is only due to the correlation between being not very good at a game and wanting a higher percentage of the players get a reward, and that is not a 100% correlation as there are other (albeit bad) reasons to play PPSC. I agree with Oli when he says that removing PPSC, forcing the PPSC population to play WTA games, will lead to a drop in quality of WTA games, but I think this will only be temporary as eventually players will adapt to the new scoring system.
@RUFFHAUS I see you wrote a rant on vRanking and while I agree with you there, I don't see how it implies that 'all ratings are bad', and certainly not how it would imply that all scoring systems are bad! If your idea of how the game should be played is consistent, then there should exist a scoring system that reflects that. The fact that apparently, 'back in the day', before I was born, games were played better, is, I think, better explained by the fact that back in the day, it was a bigger step to take to get into a game, so you only got serious players; nowadays, registering and playing are easy. By the way, the rating systems used on web- and playDiplomacy are FAR better than the one used here. It is really only on vDiplomacy that headhunting is encouraged. On webDiplomacy, the ends to which wins and draws are rewarded and losses are penalized are dependent on the ratings of the other players in your game, but not on any of the results that the other players in the game will get; only on your own. Also on webDiplomacy players simply fall off of the rating lists if they are inactive for a long time, but will be re-entered as soon as they play another ranked game, while their old ranking is remembered.
@JECE I think you are completely wrong but @drano019 already explained what I would want to say.
@Enriador Seriously? You have NEVER trouble getting people to join your games? I take the same steps as you and I literally ALWAYS have trouble with it. Maybe that is because I always play Anon WTA games with some form of press, and often choose maps that aren't necessarily popular but that I think are interesting and balanced. In fact, the sole reason why I started playing on WebDiplomacy too was because it is so difficult to get games (with settings I like) to get started here.
@nopunin10did We do penalize people who CD. If you CD often, you can't join too many games, and on top of that, CD'ing causes you to lose ranking. So @YouCan'tHandleTheTruth, if players are really CD'ing to prevent a hit to their rating (which I doubt), then they don't understand how the rating system works here.
@mouse, @nopunin10did and @G-Man noted that the two types of draws in my hypothetical scoring system were not easy to distinguish. I agree. A possible solution would be the creation of two draw buttons, or saying that the computer sees someone as a 'solo threat' if that person has more than an X percentage of supply centers and more than everyone else.