Can you play a warrior who preps out the wazoo, sure.

It is by no means neccesary to compete. In fact most of the time your prepping heavily it is working against you. If your spending 30% of your time prepping and I am spending that 30% of my time fighting I garuntee you I will end up killing more people with less preps then you just because I have had 30% more opportunities to kill people.

Yeah it means I am also a little more likely to die but death isn't that bad, especially if you have established yourself as not an asshat and people leave your things. With wuuble I had 100 kills in 100 hours pretty much using no preps as a shifter or just aura and with that I could take out village berserkers. You don't need preps if you understand when to attack and when to retreat and if you strategically retreat as soon as you see your not doing cap damage then expect your enemies will too.