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I'm a balance nazi as it were. If it's not balanced, it doesn't go into the mud. However, being a balance freak doesn't do much for people like top level heroes.
Kyrene mentioned a lot of good ways of keeping heroes occupied, the only one I could add to it are more areas that don't contain necessarily harder mobs and more crazy eq, but that have little tricks and other things hidden in them. If the hero is lazy they won't go explore the area, but a good area should keep them busy for a while. One way to slow down characters is to make the mud harder, but there's a balance to be stuck there: too hard and you lose people, not hard enough and you have a bunch of top level people sitting around bitching because they're bored.
I think part of the reason that balance gets thrown out of whack on a mud is because no one wants to say the same, everyone wants to be more powerful. So if warrior A thinks his fighting abilities aren't as strong as sorcerer B, he'll complain, and either he'll get beefed up or the sorcerer will get weakened, and in that case the sorcerer then complains they are weaker than thief C, and the cycle begins again. If the creators of the areas feed into this cycle, and start making stronger equipment for the stronger players, then it keeps going.
As a builder I feel the only way to keep the cycle from repeating over and over and over is to make sure my areas don't have stronger eq or things that will upset the balance, and to work as closely as possible with the other staff to make sure everyone makes an effort to not fall into the cycle. It's not always easy, and doesn't always work, but I try.
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