I will let MRaider respond for himself, but two things:
1) ROW stands for Rumblings of War. It is the name of a tourney. They are on ROW 5 or something. I have never played in them either, but I know guys who do and they absolutely love the system. The winner gets a crate of South African wine. Also--it is a requirement to write AARs and bonus points are awarded for good AARs. Here is a link to some of the AARs.
http://www.gregories.net/row/index.php
2) Palantir is correct. The loser in an unbalanced game would be punished on the ladder since he lost the game.
Just thinking out loud (and making stuff up)....if say the average tourney score for a scenario was a 67%-33% win for the Axis, you could say that in order to win as the Axis you have to score 68% or more or in order to win for the Allies you have to score 34% or more (67-33 is a draw). Game scores would be reported to the organizer and you would not know if you really won until all the scores were tabulated.
To balance the system, you would have to make sure that a similar level of skill was on either side of a scenario. So say we were playing with the top 10 guys on this ladder. If you wanted to reward players for having high rank, the pairups might be as follows:
Axis--players number 1, 4, 6, 8, and 10
Allies--players number 2,3,5,7, and 9
Individual matchups would be 1 vs 9, 2 vs 10, 4 vs 7, 3 vs 8.
If you wanted to get as even games as possible you might do individual match ups of 1 vs 2, 3 vs 4, 5 vs 6, 7 vs 8, and 9 vs 10.
The tourney would also have to be large enough to account for outliers skewing the results (say some fool surrenders and wins 100 to 0).
In either case, this would correct for unbalanced scenarios. Of course the best way to correct for unbalanced scenarios is to play test them extensively so you know they are not unbalanced
. In reality, however, this is often hard to do.
BTW, this is not ROW, just me blathering. In ROW there is no ladder--just six to nine games with people playing on multiple sides. Wins and losses are irrelevent--variance to average scores is everything.
All of this might be too complicated, but it is good food for thought.