What chess *scoring* alternatives exist? Chess (often being classified as a sport) stands almost alone among sports in that its results are of a strictly ternary nature that is not quantified any further: The only possible outcomes are a win, a draw or a loss.

While the same is of course true for most team or combat sports, virtually all of them go a lot further by basing the result on some sort of point score, which says a lot more about the match than merely who won: A 6-0 win in association football is not the same as a 2-1 (the first being a "crush" and the second being a rather narrow win), and a 3-3 draw is not the same as a 0-0 one (the first one indicating a wild game, the second a tenacious one). Further in-game metrics such as "ball control" and "shots on goal" are often employed to paint a high-level picture for spectators.

Given that literally hundreds, if not thousands, of variants to chess rules exist, I should be surprised if no one has ever proposed an improvement to how chess is scored, but alas, I have not found any material on that subject. I'm looking for a new angle to see top-level matches from, where, when analyzing games, one often cannot help but feel that some are won by a larger margin than others, and similar insights.

Do any alternatives to ternary (win, draw, loss) chess scoring exist?
I think the only alternative would be in match play or comparing a player's score across multiple games against another player or players.

For example, in a 12 game match between two players:

(+3 =8 -1) would be worse than (+5 =6 -1)

even though the first player won both matches.

Scoring by material count or number of moves played would not be beneficial. If the number of moves mattered, with shorter games being considered crushing defeats, players would just refuse to resign and drag the game out. On the other hand, I can lose in two moves without losing any pieces.

The only thing that seems to make sense is to compare score across multiple games against an opponent or field of opponents. You may have a better comparison considering a GM's total score in a tournament with many rounds. In a 9 round tournament, a 9.0 score would be crushing the competition. Winning the tournament with 6.5 would be less of an accomplishment.