Is WoW PvP still a game?

Some eye-opening insights on what it takes to reach rank 14, the highest honor rank in World of Warcraft PvP are described in a series of interwiews on NotAddicted

Frybread: How much effort does it take, really? From start to finish?
Medeve whispers: rank 4 - 14 took me about 5 months of finishing top 10 standing every week, usually top 6
Bosco whispers: like 5 months
Bosco whispers: i pugged for 3 of those
Frybread: How much would you play daily?
Medeve whispers: 14-15 hours average
Frybread: Did you put in any sleepless nights?
Bosco whispers: if you call 1-3 hours [of sleep] max then yeah i put in quite a bit.

5 months of 14 to 15 hours per day to reach rank 14? That is over 2,000 hours, four times more than it takes to level from 1 to 60 in PvE! No thanks, mate. The author thinks that the problem with this is decay, the stupid mechanism that if you don't do any PvP for a week you lose rank massively. But I say that the real problem is that the system is relative, not absolute. While in the PvE game you can exactly calculate how many rats you need to kill to go up one level, in the PvP game your rank depends on how much more you play than the other players on your server. Thus a few person without a job / school / life, who can play 15 hours a day set the barrier which you have to climb to reach the top.

Or you just have your account participate 24 hours a day in PvP, by paying a powerleveling service. Then 3 players from a third world economy will play on your account in shifts, doing PvP all the time until you get to rank 14. Cost to go from nothing to rank 14, according to this site, is $2,800, and the process takes 4 to 5 months. Of course during that time you can't access your account to play yourself, so as you live in a first world economy, you could use those 15 hours per day for 5 months do earn considerably more than $2,800, even if you just flip burgers or mow lawns. And you have the satisfaction that by employing people to play PvP for you 24 hours a day, it becomes even harder for other people on your server to reach the highest PvP rank.

Is that still a game?

I would say that both relative ranking and decay in World of Warcraft PvP have to go. Just create a fixed "PvP XP" curve, where you earn PvP XP for kills and for battleground victories, and you know exactly how many more PvP XP you need for the next level, and to reach the PvP level cap. Leveling your PvP rank up to the cap should not take more hours than leveling a character to the PvE level cap. And you should be able to do it over whatever period of time is convenient to you.

Unless WoW PvP is changed to a fixed points system, it remains just an oddity in the game. Everybody plays a couple of battleground and then most players just give up on it, because they can't compete with those who have nothing else to do. If you meet a High Warlord or Grand Marshall in WoW, you might want to express your compassion for the poor guy having wasted so much of his life for so little reward.