Cannot friend alts in game

I've tried sending friend requests to my in game alts, one was accepted last year. The 2 new ones that I tried this week come up as no such character found.
whether I try with new or old characters, they cannot befriend each other, the no such character keeps coming up.
Anybody recognise this problem? how is it fixed?

This game does not allow you to add your alts to your friendslist. If you were able to in the past it was due to a bug. The reason for this is because the devs think that preventing characters on the same account from trading items to each other in the mail some how slows down RMT activity (it doesn't, RMT easiliy circumvent this restriction by forming FCs and using the FC chest to transfer items instead. Which is in-fact a superior method of transferring items and gil. Since there is no cap on gil transfers, and many more items can be moved in less time. So even if there was no restriction on transferring items via mail, RMT would likely still use the FC chest anyway, but I digress).

To explain further, the error message you're getting "no such character found" is because your alt is offline. The character search can only find characters that are currently logged into the game. Since you can't be online with two characters on the same account at the same time, it's impossible to add your alt to your friendslist.

Never accept the original explanation.

The real reason is you can mail items to yourself, for "infinite" storage space.
This adds extra load on the servers, and gets rid of incentives to pay for extra retainers.

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Originally Posted by Deadagain

I've tried sending friend requests to my in game alts, one was accepted last year. The 2 new ones that I tried this week come up as no such character found.
whether I try with new or old characters, they cannot befriend each other, the no such character keeps coming up.
Anybody recognise this problem? how is it fixed?

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You are not supposed to be able to friend your alts.

You can only friend a character that is online at the same time as you, since they need to accept the friend request. You cannot have two characters from the same account online at the same time, since you will be logged out from the first as soon as you log in with the second if not before.

It has been possible to friend alts a few times in the past by exploiting bugs in the game, but all known such bugs have been fixed.