With my six-month World of Warcraft subscription coming up for renewal very soon, I've seriously thought about not continuing it for now, and then renewinig when the expansion comes out.

However, the game's just too fun. I continue to try to cut back the time in Azeroth, but one thing leads to another and the fun continues. So many goals, so little time. I will endeavour to not play as much, especially just mindless grinding late at night, and concentrate more on playing with other people, which is a large part of what makes the game so enjoyable.

Myz recently decided to go whole-hog for a particularly nice, yet (of course) very hard-to-obtain hat. To get this, she needs (among other rare things) one Pristine Hide of the Beast, which comes from a really nasty monster in a place called Upper Black Rock Spire. After you and 10 or 15 friends take down The Beast, it has to be skinned in order to get the Hide.

The catch is that the level of skinning craft needed to get the Hide is higher than it's possible to train up to in the game. So how do you get his hide? You need a special dagger that gives a bonus to your skinning skills. This dagger is called Finkle's Skinner. Where do you get it? Only from the The Beast, of course. Sometimes, when he dies, you find it on his body.

Ok, so once you have the special dagger, then you're set to get the hide, right? Well, yes, as long as your skinning level is at maximum, then you get the chance to skin The Beast. Even when you do skin him, however, there's only a very slight chance he has the Pristine Hide on him.

Further... not only must you have the dagger and then hope he has the Hide, but you must compete against any other skinners in the 10-to-15-person party to get the dagger in the first place, and then, if the Hide drops, you have to contend with those same 10-15 people to win the Hide itself, because many of them will be there hoping for it too. This assumes, too, that only one person has the special dagger (from some earlier time) and isn't going for the privilege to skin as well.

But if you skinned it, shouldn't it be yours? Yes... and... no. There are many strong feelings about the Hide, because it's used in a number of quests, and chances are high that a particular person who needs the skin for a quest isn't a skinner. Of course the person who skinned The Beast couldn't have killed it without everyone else's help, so it's a paradoxical situation about who should get the Hide, which is not traditional loot that can be locked by the game itself to the party leader for distribution to the most deserving player.

Many people have discussed this problem in the online forums and the answers are as varied as the number of people (a lot). The Hide does appear in the auction house occasionally, but it's always for a huge amount of money, which Myz isn't willing to spend.

What's a girl (mage) to do? For best chance of getting the Hide herself, Myzythra changed crafting skills. She dumped the lucrative mining and spent about a whole day going from 0-300 in skinning, just so she could have the best of both worlds: being a skinner AND having a quest for the Hide. Now all she has to do is join raid after raid in the Spire until she gets the dagger and/or skins The Beast and/or rolls the highest number to get the Hide once it's found on the body.

Ah, but to have Cap of the Scarlet Savant... (stupid, goal-driven game :-)