What about "gear loot boxes"? A box, which contains random gear (not a trash like temporary upgrades, receipes, etc..). The item quality would depend on a player level, starting at let's say 90 % green / 10 % blue on level 1-9 growing to 60 % blue / 38 % purple / 2 % orange on level 80 - 84, then each level raising chance to get orange gear and lowering chance to get blue gear. At level 100 get 1 % on red item and then growing...
You may get that as a reward, or buy for 5 - 10 rubbies. You may buy only let's say 1 - 5 / day. (to prevent this feature from being to powerful).
It would help to get more good gear (or at least materials) and also cold bring some extra money to GF 
Another ideas just would be to improve chance o get quality drop on expeditions ("why I get 10 - 20 recepies each time I use Dispater I. costume on level 111?")
Also some boost for slow servers would help (more exp, better forge chance or higher material drop chance). I play 2 yrs on slow server with mostly orange gear, getting beated by newbies on fast servers full in red underground gear 
And lastly, server merging more often: Fast servers are good to start, but those servers are also quickly dead. In CZ rep we have now 9 servers I gues, first 7 of them having about 30 active players max..
