Phantoms and messages: real time or not?

[Bullett00th]

Been playing From games for ages but only now have I started wondering if the white phantoms you see walking around are from players who are there right now, recently, or from a randomly chosen time 'archived' into the game?

Similar question regarding messages. I've started leaving messages properly only in ER and I see they get approvals relatively often, but always when I'm online and in the game. As in, I never log in to discover that an old message of mine received an additional rating or two. Does this mean the messages are only displayed from players who are now currently in the game?

And I guess the same question goes about blood puddles showing player deaths.

[umeng2002]

I believe so.

[LuckyCheshire]

Phantoms are not real time, I believe that they're only recent, but I could be wrong about that. I did, once, encounter a phantom of myself from ~20-30 seconds earlier going the opposite direction. That's probably an extremely rare occurrence though.

Messages on the other hand, are permanent fixtures until deleted, as are bloodstains. That's why there are a couple (usually troll) messages floating around with 999 upvotes that presumably got added shortly after launch. When there are several messages in the same area though, some kind of pseudo-randomizer mechanic that I don't have a very firm grasp on selects only certain ones to appear. Again, I'm not too sure since I haven't strictly tested, but I'm pretty certain that upvotes still count even when you're not using a character. I can see certain messages that I left with an alternate character, for example. Now that I think of it, messages are probably region-locked, so if you mostly play during a certain time of day, you may just be matching up with when most people in your region are playing.

[an entire Roman legion]

messages only show if the character who wrote them is online