Yeah I think the idea of random beasts is a bit stupid. People will either delete or play a character they didn't really like.
It should not be any sort of problem to let it be a choice. There are MANY MANY ways it could be implemented while retaining a "rich culture" for the werebeasts.
I personally like the questing idea and would volunteer to help make quests. They could either choose to do a quest at 15 or if they don't at lvl 16 they would be randomly assigned a beast. It would take a little coding, but then again we could just let it be a choice at char creation, or even a selectable skill.
To those of you that say, "Man up!" "Put in the hard work" or "You bi**h and moan too much."
You are incredibly unproductive and are doing nothing to promote creative thinking within this mud. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with hard work in getting your desired beast. It is totally random. To call it abuse Zhokril? That is just silly. People choose a race at char creation because they have the RP decided on.
Why can't people RP the desired werebeast that they want without having to technically abuse the system?