I used to play Aardwolf a lot, and I still have some friends who do. However, I eventually left for a number of reasons. I'll start with the good stuff on Aardwolf. The world is large, and new areas open often. I didn't find any stock areas on Aardwolf, and most of the room descriptions are well written. When you're levelling, you always have something to do: between campaigns, quests, global quests, and goals, you always have something you're trying to achieve. Accessibility support is top notch, especially if you're competent enough to use spelltags and GMCP. Note that you shouldn't use vipmud on this mud, as it does not support mud client compression protocol, so you will receive penalties every time you complete a quest.
Ok, these good things said, Aardwolf has some serious, serious problems. First off, the goals. Some of them are interesting and fun, but the vast majority of them have solutions along the lines of: go through the hidden exit that is never described in any room of the area and you can only find out about by asking another player, say the exact right thing to three NPCs without any prompting from them, guess the verb to use the custom object, and then kill the exact right NPC to get the key to go through a door even though you have no idea what NPC is the correct one and killing the correct NPC will only result in your getting the key about 20% of the time. When you quit, of course, all of your keys are lost. But unfortunately, the autoquests can require you to go through this procedure easily 30 or 40 times while you're trying to gather quest points. I am a lover of interactive fiction and Infocom text adventures, so it isn't that I'm afraid of puzzles, or particularly bad at solving them. It's that many area builders seem to want to make area goals that are extremely hard to solve, and seem proud of the fact that players have inordinate difficulty with them. While chasing after difficulty, it feels like all attention to appropriate levels of hinting, fair descriptions, alternate commands (you have to enter hum, not sing, typing read flames doesn't work to read the message in the flames, only read message does, and changing this would apparently make things too easy), and fun, has been lost. If you complain about this, or ask for public solutions to goals, you will be flamed. Hard. If you ask for directions, you will be told to consult maps. Unfortunately, the maps that are accessible are only a tiny fraction of the area maps available. If you point this out, you will also be flamed. Sharing solutions to goals publicly is against the Aardwolf rules, and Lasher will request any website with public information about goals be taken down. What this means in practice is that all clans have private websites where they post goal walkthroughs. Completing the goals gives an advantage of faster travel that is so huge, in regular and global quests, that these secret goal solutions are heavily protected, and used to keep new players from advancing or having the same ability to win global quests as clan players. I suspect this is why the entrenched playerbase will resist anything at all that could risk making goals fair, as they don't want to lose the massive advantage they have from their secret walkthroughs.
If you do want to play on aardwolf, you should contact helpful players like rejbear and TwinkleTwinkle, if either of them are still around. They have access to much of the information you will need, and befriending them and getting a hand up is the only way you will be able to play on an equal playing field with established players.
Added to this problem, at least when I was actively playing a year or so ago, Aardwolf had huge class balance problems. I believe work was progressing towards fixing some of these issues, but it was causing massive amounts of player whining, and lots of skill changes. Also, unless you're a t3 or so, you can probably forget about getting any wins in the pk arena. The fact that you're a new player means you will be so overpowered it isn't even worth trying. I do know admins were aware of the balance problems though, so perhaps something has been done since I was on.
Lastly, Aardwolf doesn't seem to have anything like the bot thwacker on Alter Aeon, or if they do, it doesn't seem to work. When global quests are announced, scripted players, using a combination of grey area scripts, portals they got from following secret goal walkthroughs, NPC databases, and customized fastwalks, will have won the global quest before you've even found the first target, sometimes before you've even finished reading the list of targets required. This is another area where, as a new player, you might as well not even bother.
Please don't take me wrong. I want to love Aardwolf, I really, really do! A lot of players, perhaps even the majority, are nice people. Lasher is a friendly, approachable mud admin, and I've enjoyed all of the few conversations I've ever had with him. But either he doesn't see the problems I pointed out above as problems, or his vision of Aardwolf and what I want from a mud are not well aligned. So, after six or so months of playing, I got busy with real life, and then I never came back to Aardwolf, as the frustration was just too much. I found I would start an Aardwolf session having fun, and end my session frustrated and stressed out, with strong feelings that the goal I had just solved by asking was unfair, or that I had just done something where I had no chance of success, so what was the point. But that may be just me. If you have a higher frustration threshold, and a thicker skin, than I do, there is a lot of fun to be found on Aardwolf.
As an aside to an already massive post, I've recently been casually mudding on Alter Aeon again. At least on the newbie Islands, this mud gets everything right that Aardwolf gets so wrong in goals. Even when I get stumped by a goal on Alter Aeon and have to ask for help, my reaction is generally "Oh, of course! I should have thought of that!" After getting a solution to a goal on Aardwolf, my reaction is almost always "How in the hell was I ever supposed to have any chance of figuring that out?"