So I was thinking about the restrictions that Preferred/F2P people have, such as limited credts/commendations, mail, and revives in particular.

I have some suggestions that (I think) would entice people to spend more CC, benefit the community overall, and make Preferred status have overall greater value.

1) sell CM unlocks that expand credit/commendation caps. For credits make each purchase of an unlock increase the total available credits increase by 150,000 with a limit of 2 million total credits. Like the Quickbar expansion this gives non-subs an additional motivation to buy CC. It helps the community overall by increasing the total number of potential buyers of expensive GTN items. Subs who sell rare stuff for credits have an expanded market to sell to (and coincidentally this gives greater value to GTN expansion CM items since non-subs can reap more benefit from selling more stuff).

As an aside: I would recommend increasing the Preferred credit cap to at least 400K, or better 500K. This makes the math simpler for arriving at a round number with unlocks. At 350K as it is currently might result in 1) the credit cap being an odd number which won't look as nice (eg 2,050,000 credits instead of 2,250,000 or something) 2) it risks that if one buys as many unlocks are required to reach the cap that you wouldn't increase your wallet size by the full amount (for example the cap is 2 million but only 100K of the unlock's total of 150K can be applied so the final unlock carries less total bang for your buck than the previous unlocks you bought for the same price).

Likewise commendation caps would have a CM unlock which would just improve quality of life for Preferred/F2P people. While not allowing the cap to be raised to full sub levels by giving them the ability to see what it is like it may tempt them to sub for an even greater cap raise.

2) allow all players to send items/credits between characters on their Legacy. As just quality of life it will make crew skills more valuable (and thus the CM unlock more temping) since all players can reap the benefits. Alternately make it an account wide CM unlock like Legacy or Titles (no per character option though since that would be difficult/impossible to implement).

3) rather than having 5 med probes and then run out unless you buy more make it 5 free med probes weekly (non-staking) with the option to purchase more. Works similar to the FP/WZ weekly restriction. While not unlimited probes it doesn't harshly punish newbies for making a lot of mistakes since they're only asked to pay money if they run out that week, not pay money if they ever want to have a field revive again. Also gives greater incentive to sub since Preferred/F2P will be able to more extensively experience the benefits of field revives and similar to the idea of FP/WZ restrictions tempt players to sub to receive unlimited weekly access.

4) with items that have a time delay to BoP (such as FP loot) allow all players to trade the item with group members regardless of account status. This way if a F2P newbie screws up and rolls "need" on an item they can undo that mistake by trading the item. The exception only applies to BoP items with a time delay before binding and only so long as the player does not leave the group they are in (so they can't roll 'need", leave their original group, form a new group and trade the BoP item to a totally different player). This simply improves the community overall by not giving subs an additional reason to hate F2P people.

I heavily agree on all counts, but I'd like to point out:

1) I think instead of 150k per upgrade, the preferred status cap should be raised to 500k and have each upgrade be 500k, since I just KNOW they'd make the price high for the upgrade, may as well get a good amount from it.

As to #2, is that really a subscriber only thing?... Well this will prove annoying when my subscription dies out.

I heavily agree on all counts, but I'd like to point out:

 

1) I think instead of 150k per upgrade, the preferred status cap should be raised to 500k and have each upgrade be 500k, since I just KNOW they'd make the price high for the upgrade, may as well get a good amount from it.

Personally I think they should upgrade preferred to 500K because it makes the math simpler. they can then sell 250K or 500K cap increases but at any rate it would make the math nicer in how to arrive at a round number.

As to #2, is that really a subscriber only thing?... Well this will prove annoying when my subscription dies out.

To my knowledge Preferred can send items but not credits. As far as I know whatever preferred/F2P restrictions exist for player to player mails also applies to character to character mails within your Legacy. Not as bad as it could be but it's kinda stupid if you've got a level 50 with credits to spare and you're level 15 alt needs 2K credits more to buy something but you can't mail the credits to a character within your own Legacy.