Yes you do need to cooperate on those servers to rank.
You can also play as a war guild, though that is difficult for noobs too, but you learn alot by dying
The noob server isn't really only for noobs, it just cuts out the ultimate spells which simplify things somewhat, but there are still plenty of hard core players. And the arch server allows oversummoning which is a PITA in my opinion.
I suggest making a couple mages on different servers just to practice the opening sequence of building up to research. Here's some basic guidance for starting a new mage. You can find lots of this information in greater detail in the guides or forums though as well:
Critical thing to realize is that you genrally want 100% research completely before you go attack crazy.
Also you are protected for the first 120 turns, so use them to explore and build, then wait for the server limit (or close to it) turns to accumuulate and spend those all so that you essentially got 300 turns of protection to set yourself up.
Research occurs automatically, but you want lots of guilds to speed it up. So first thing to do is build up to 299 (or 399) workshops to speed up your building, build them in small batches (1 or 2 turn max builds) else you lose the extra build potential.
Then start building guilds and only guilds. Explore ~5 turns, build guilds, repeat until you are ~2000 acres or are hitting 120 turns.
Oh, and disband your entire starting army, it's **** anyway, do that first so you don't waste the upkeep. You can also destroy your baracks for more room for guilds/workshops.
Research should start in phantasm magic until you get concentration (this is for any color), then switch it around to pick up the cheap spells as you build more guilds. The expensive spells get a bigger relative break in research time as you max out your guilds (1000+ is what you want). When your spell power gets to ~70 cast concentration, this will speed up your research some more.
AFter this dispell and recast concentration every time your spell power goes up by 60 or so.
You can also look at what skill you want to advance, this depends on color and play style, but Legendary Commander and Grand conquorer are not bad one's to get at least one level in early, after that you probably want to switch to your colors specific skill.
Ignore the black market for the most part until you figure out some of the rest of the game.
Sitting on a big pile of geld is good because later on if there is a nice hero available you can bid on them and have a shot at them. Getting low level cheap heros is usually a waste, especailly if you haven't figured out how to properly stack your army as you will get your hero(s) killed too easily.