"Why we need an official raid map"

#PokemonGO: When legendary raids first started, I was in a facebook group chat for organising raids. I found that consistently I was able to head into the city centre while monitoring the group chat, and they'd always end up being a raid fairly close to me (within about 10-20 mins walking distance). Then there would always be a big group there, and after the raid was done there's be another raid on the chat that most people will also be heading to, so we could travel around the city together looking for raids, until the end of the day when raids stop. This was fun and prompted me to spend money on the game for the second time ever, buying a bunch of special boxes containing raid passes.Now, my city has a Discord chat set up with a scanning bot that will post rare pokemon and raids. Recently, that went down for some reason (probably some ban wave on bots?). Normally, I wouldn't care at all. I don't use scanning services, so them being down doesn't affect me at all. However, yesterday I tried going raiding again after a bit of a break of not doing raids for a while. I went to the nearest legendary that was being mentioned in the group chat in the hopes of getting a group together for more raids. The people there had already done it but a few more people showed up later and we managed to beat it. However, due to the lack of a scanner, no one knew where the next closest raid was, since now they had to depend on word of mouth alone, someone has to see the raid in person and post it on the chat. Which didn't happen, so the group separated as quickly as it had formed, leaving me alone again. I waited around for about 30 mins checking if any raids popped up near me or in the chat, but nothing happened so I decided to go home.I was only able to do 1 raid that day. That's when I realised how much the raiding community depends on scanners. I get Niantic wanting to take them down, since they are agaonst the ToS, and scanners for rare pokemon are IMO cheating. But if Niantic want to see more people doing raids and buying raid passes, and they also want to crack down on 3rd party scanners, then they NEED to have an OFFICIAL map, or even an API, for finding raids. The limit of what you can see in the map is simply not enough for effective organisation.TL;DR: We need an official map because a fun raid dynamic is reliant on people knowing where raids are. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2viz86N