A roleplaying game is only a roleplaying game when the game system encourages roleplaying. Same goes for community things.
It's a social problem, one that can be corrected with encouragement, and a more feature rich and bug-less server software.
Personally, I consider the whole invest time to level a character thing a huge hassle. As a server-op/Dev team guy (I'm not, just supposing though) I'd rework the code to a hybrid skill system. All levels would require the same amount of exp(Not to sure, but the EXP curve could be changed), level cap would be heightened. Instead of gaining higher skill caps when you level, you would be given training points, you would use those training points to then train skills. Skills wouldn't go up from use, and there would be no level cap (So if someone wanted to train strictly defense, they could. Choosing a class simply limits which skills you would have access to. As an option, perhaps once you have leveled to 100 (or whatever level cap is set) you can have the character re-incarnate as whatever other class they choose.
And of course, there's the whole removing the #summonitem and other such commands from standard user access level.
Why go through all that trouble? Well, the Uber-Me's are all after that little Uber experiance that they can't get from EQLive. Having a system where #level 60 isn't at all like being level 60 at EQLive discourages them from going to your server specifically for that Hit of Uber. I also agree with the whole new Item database idea.
Shift focus from uber-me to building community.
Just an idea, of course.
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