Quote Originally Posted by Shouko View Post
I agree it would be nice to have but it's probably tied into coding of the game saying that you need to be online in order to receive an invite of some sort. In order to bypass this they would most likely have to change the way invites work.
Like everyone else I have no idea what the official reason is, but it's very likely by design.

When 2.0 came out there was a small period where you could add your alts as friends (by exiting the game in a dungeon, signing in to the other character, sending a friend request to the person in a dungeon, swapping back, coming out the dungeon and accept it), but within a few weeks SE patched/fixed it so you couldn't send friend requests to people in instances. So the way I read that is it's not so much the system couldn't do it, they just don't want us to.

I have no idea what happened to people who added their alts during that window though and if they're still on theirs own friends list etc (I didn't have an alt at the time so never tried it).