Have map. Can't travel.

Some of my so-called "friends" got me to play World of Warcraft... again.

Yeah, I had played it when it first launched, but quickly got bored and frustrated. My "friends" insisted that I was simply playing the wrong class. Well, after City of Heroes & Guild Wars finally bored me beyond words, I took their advice and created a Tauren Hunter in WoW last week. It was actually fun. I was having a great time and then I got a pet! Yay! A big saber-toothed kitty thing to travel around with me and kill stuff. It was a good time! Evil beasties fell to the thunder of my boomstick and the claws of my feline minion. Things were looking up!

But then...

My cow-man hunter now has 6 missions in his list of things to do. All six missions are of the "go there and do this" sort. The problem is that the directions to stated "there" are unbeleivably useless. "Go northeast"... "Find an oasis"... "Go north"... Seriously, those are the directions I've been given. I went for a run for an HOUR looking for one of these destinations and couldn't find it.

Why can't the directions be a bit more specific? Or better yet: the game has a MAP that users can pull up at any point while gaming. Why can't the NPC giving me the mission MARK the destination on my map? Hell, even just a general area to search would be an improvement.

See, when I play a game, I want the experience to be game play. You know, playing a game. I don't want it to be work! I don't want the game to make me feel like I'm driving a 1977 Dodge Aspen north-bound along some completely unmarked road in Nebraska when I'm trying to find my way from Monterey to Oakland, California.

So, one of my "friends" says, "Oh, you just need the map plug in. It'll give you the coordinates." And my thought on that is: this game is so badly designed that end-users are forced to make applications to fix its flaws?

Explain to me again why this game is good?