alt Hacker News> I believe what is happening is that those images are being drawn by some script-kiddies.
Oh absolutely not. I've seen so many autistic people literally just nolifing and also collaborating on huge arts on wplace. It is absolutely not just script kiddies.
> 3 billion requests / 2 million users is an average of 1,500 req/user. A normal user might make 10-20 requests when loading a map, so these are extremely high, scripted use cases.
I don't know about that either. Users don't just load a map, they look all around the place to search for and see a bunch of the art others have made. I don't know how many requests is typical for "exploring a map for hours on end" but I imagine a lot of people are doing just that.
I wouldn't completely discount automation but these usage patterns seem by far not impossible. Especially since wplace didn't expect sudden popularity so they may not have optimized their traffic patterns as much as they could have.
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There are some user scripts to overlay templates on the map and coordinate working together, but I can't imagine that increases the load much. What might is that wplace has been struggling under the load and you have to refresh to see your pixels placed or any changes and that could be causing more calls an hour maybe?
Just scrolled around a little bit 2-3minutes with network monitor open. That already resulted in 500requests, 5MB transferred (after filtering by vector tile data). Not sure how many of those got cached by browser with no actual requests, cached by browser exchanging only headers or cached by cloudflare. I am guessing that the typical 10-20 requests/user case is for embedded map fragment like those commonly found in contact page where most users don't scroll at all or at most slightly zoom out to better see rest of city.