Soon EQ will start yelling at the kids to get off its lawn.

The EQVault at IGN has an interesting article about aging MMOs up that's worth a look.

The phenomenon of boxing reveals some fundamental truths about an aging game, which will affect the future of its design: accounts are recycled, high end content is preferred, and even veteran players making new characters start off on a fast track -- in large part because they know all the tricks and shortcuts -- thus presenting new players with a challenging entry experience. What should design teams do to keep an iconic lifetime game interesting, given that they can’t change the game engine to handle state of the art graphics, and can’t rewrite millions of lines of legacy code? This is a new puzzle in a maturing genre that will face any lifetime MMO.

Read more at EQVault.