This is generally true but lots of pre-mades are not quality and worlds end without a premade winning. There are plenty of good players that just start and see how the world develops over startup->midgame and jump into a tribe after all the clean work is done. There is a perception that pre-mades are always the best players but I feel its mainly the mostly active skypers which doesn't mean they are top quality.
It also doesn't take much to become good at this game. Just a decent mentor and dedication and drive to learn the tactics to defend and attack. The rest is teamwork and good leadership working for the tribe. Anyone can become good at TW during there first startup and hit top 20 within a month of playing for the first time.
I'm not sure I buy into the "Premades ruin Tribal Wars" narrative though I have used it for PnP amusement. It is certainly a significant advantage that is offputting for those attempting to compete against that.
I always find myself looking at past worlds and tracking the percentage of recent worlds that have either been won by a premade, a merger between two premades or a reformation of a fallen premade. There was a thread back on World 90 documenting the number of premades that had won the previous 10 worlds. Did you know W85-W90 were all won by premades? When you actually go back and you count, there are a few exceptions to the rule but most worlds since P2W was implemented fully were won by premades.
Not to say there is anything necessarily wrong with that, however the advantage of being premade is far more than is typically stated. Yes, it is having better players and better leadership, but it is also having cores with battle experience together from past worlds, loyalty that crosses worlds, the ability to choose your starting position and spread, the ability to put plants in competitors from the start of the world and the ability to abuse the system to get ahead by building villages for coplayers to take and this general list goes on. Talking of coplayers, most average joes do not have them and therefore have a large period of inactivity when they sleep that can be taken advantage of.
One can say similar of becoming good at this game. Whilst it is perfectly possible theoretically to become a top player in a month or two, in practice it is rarely if ever done. When I started on W1, I was rubbish even though I got to half a million. I was rubbish in W2 and W3 and W5. It was only when I got to about W10 and got into a decent tribe by pretending to be someone else, that I got with a group of players that I could start to learn a bit about the game beyond what I had essentially figured out on my own. There need to be a large multitude of factors colliding in order for you to become good in a short period of time. Realistically, it doesn't happen. Most of the time, you can have the activity and drive but no resources or the opposite where the resources are there but the activity and drive aren't.
On old worlds, these factors were mostly irrelevant. There were so many players that those conditions presented themselves more often than they do nowadays and more importantly there was a lot more time in order to create Tribal atmosphere, teamwork, war experience and player skill base necessary to compete at the top level.
In W100, the worlds are so small that you can create a tribe and might have to fight a premade like Beast at catapults or nobles as your first fight as a tribe. In fact this was the reason I didn't take my tribe seriously and just used it as a time passer whilst I applied to join a multitude of premades. It was only when I got rejected a few times that I decided to continue on with Code and see where it went.
