It's the nature of MMO's, they have to introduce fresher content to keep the current players happy, and then new players to it are in places with less population and as such the experience isn't the same.
I wonder how many actual zones eqlive has now, i mean it must be hundreds... maybe even thousands. And factor into that how few people play (especially at lower levels) and then you end up with the game being geared towards the max level players, even WoW's gone that way. So what you get from that is a bunch of excess zones that no longer serve a purpose because you're only in that level range for a small amount of time.
On the note of EQlive, i remember them doing the revamps of BB, guk, unrest and CT. Those zones became quite lively at that time
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] then they introduced the classic monster missions. Basically they were just trying to give players a feel of the old stuff... and that's why we're all here at p99. We want the old stuff because that was the fun stuff.