Excuse topic title please, as I wasn't sure how to put it really.
I've not come across a topic covering this, but I believe it was Bart that I was chatting IG to about it.
You make a friend, they are a friend, irrespective of which character they are using at the time. With the friends list so short I find that a good third of my list is taken up by Alt characters of existing friends, with me having to delete some that have not been on so much.
My proposal is that your friends list reflects when an account is online not a character. The "account" would be either that persons 1st character, or better still the character that you added to friends list, and so are most familiar with.
This would show on friends list with active character in brackets in different colour after the "account" name and would report in chat box in the same way.
ie
RikkaLarn (Caracatus) or RikkaLarn (RikkaLarn)
or
RikkaLarn (Caracatus) is offline!
RikkaLarn (RikkaLarn) is online!
Much of my suggestions lean towards creating and maintaining a strong game community. I hope plenty of you share your thoughts on this.
Cheers all