> For those of us who didn't use maps--most everyone I know--it was this advantage others had that made it terribly non-fun to play. Why bother playing when everyone is cheating?
I didn't use maps. I also didn't feel like those who did were cheating, or that I was any worse off for them using maps.
The 'competition' in Pokemon Go was really minimal, and maps had very little effect on them. The only competitive aspect to Pokemon Go is gym battling. If you care only about collecting, you actually benefit from map users, because they're the ones likely to drop lures.
As for gym battling, yes, maps might have had a negative effect on the competitive landscape there. But the competitive mechanics for gym battling were so fundamentally broken from the start that it's not reasonable to blame it on map users for "cheating".
(How were they broken, might you ask? Well, the fact that moves have such a wide variance in DPS, combined with the fact that movesets are entirely random and randomized upon evolution makes obtaining strong Pokemon entirely a matter of luck. Couple that with the fact that leveling up rare Pokemon requires... finding lots of that same rare Pokemon to turn into candy means that obtaining the strongest Pokemon (which are usually rare) is a matter of repeated luck + time spent grinding. Next, battling is kind of pointless until you're around level 15-20, because you'll almost certainly lose, and the amount of XP you gain from beating a single Pokemon is insultingly small. And finally, the battling itself was highly dependent on the latency of your Internet connection. This was fixed in a recent update, but it was a huge annoyance in the first week or two).