As it stands right now, the only way to raise combat skills (at a reasonable rate) is to swing endlessly at a training dummy or at another player's shield. This method more or less requires players to macro combat training - and when they're finished, they (the players) are not likely to be any better with a weapon than when they started.
In our experience, actually dueling with training weapons is not viable since they do far too much damage, and someone is going to hit 0 soft HP is two or three minutes.
A suggestion: change wooden practice weapons to do zero damage to an armored player. If there must be some damage, make it 0.2 (for everyone cheesily leveling combat skills, 0.2 is a familiar number). At least this way, players might actual gain some personal proficiency.