Is there a reason why offline players cannot be searched?

[Paruza]

So I made an alt... and I'm trying to friend myself so I can mail items, invite to fc, etc, pretty basic.

However since you cannot search for players that are offline I can't think of a way to actually get my alt into my friends list. Inviting from a linkshell or otherwise doesn't seem to work either since it just says "Player not found".

Is this for some reason intentional? Or is it just pretty much missing functionality still leftover from beta or something? Any workarounds? If the only option is to trust a player to help you with it, it just wastes their time, and leaves the whole thing open to abuse & theft.

[Returnee]

So I made an alt... and I'm trying to friend myself so I can mail items, invite to fc, etc, pretty basic.

However since you cannot search for players that are offline I can't think of a way to actually get my alt into my friends list. Inviting from a linkshell or otherwise doesn't seem to work either since it just says "Player not found".

Is this for some reason intentional? Or is it just pretty much missing functionality still leftover from beta or something? Any workarounds? If the only option is to trust a player to help you with it, it just wastes their time, and leaves the whole thing open to abuse & theft.

I can't imagine any reason to intentionally leave this capability out; my guess is that it was because the game's design encourages having one character rather than many, and so long as players stick to that anticipated user path, they won't need to do this. It would be nice to have for those that do, though.

[Paruza]

... It would be nice to have for those that do, though.

It spills over to other areas as well, like how if a player DC's in an instance, it will show them online and in that instance until they log back in. Rather confusing.