DISCLAIMER: This would be a HUGE change to cf overall

Just an idea I started kicking around a while ago, after having a conversation about practicing. Now, two things I think the playerbase generally agrees with:
1. skill spam is quite boring, and tiresom to do.
2. skill spam will give players who have the patience to do it an advantage (the significance of the advantage can be debated, in my experience it makes a huge difference to land an 8 hit flurry or a 5 hit one)
3. spamprac is frowned upon, and changes have been made to make it harder and less rewarding

So, we have a problem. Making spamprac harder and more time consuming will discourage a large populace of doing so, but we will always have the people who still do it standing out, especially so in the mid-level range, and with classes that do not get a lot of practice to crucial skills while ranking.

My bold suggestion to fix the situation, is a complete revamp to the practice, or should we call it skill improvement system. Ditch improvements via use gains completely. Introduce skill gains recieved at level, PKing, and aging.

Since the intelligence of races is a balancing factor, int should definately play a factor in how fast you learn skill.

So, how I thought it would be, each time you rank up, you get a chance to improve in your skills, perhaps 1-2% or 0-2%, based on your int, where the usual gain would be 1% and races with 20+ int would recieve occasional 2 pointers.

Aging would make your skills better. This can be viewed odd in a roleplay sence (sitting, doing nothing and your skills go up). But it can also be viewed as the gradual increase of prowess while living the bloody life of a cf adventurer.

The toughest nut to crack is figuring out a way to have PK improvements for gills, without the system being highly exploitable. First I though about having a counter that counts time in PK and gives gains based on it, but ditched this idea as way too abuseable. Then I came up with making it go up with each time you kill someone, but this would be too rewarding to low level PK spam, and also abuseable by rolling chars and having your buddies roll low level chars. So, what I decided might be best, is have a level cap at 30ish. After that with each player is DEAD, you get a chance to increase 0-2% in every skill/spell you used in the fight.

Now, I know that this system would be a huge change and has a lot to improve, but it is just something I thought about. I realise it has some inherent folly, but it also has merit. The main reason I believe it would be good for cf in general, since it would remove silly speculation on which and which hidden stat affects learning rate and how, aswell as endless argument over skill practice. Also, it would solve the problem of 'mindless spam practice' being necessary, profittable or even possible.

P.S. A lot of other, related things would need a bit of tweeking with such changes, and I doubt such a drastic change being implemented. But I would like to at least hear what you think of it.