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All right, I'm gonna whirlwind through this: I'm preparing for a huge World of Warcraft campaign (will last about 4 years worth of weekly meetings), and I've got mostly everything figured out. It'll be using E6 (with levels granted for a certain number of sessions rather than by using XP), some variant rules like armor as DR, and will have each expansion be treated as its own campaign.
The one thing I haven't quite settled on is that I want players to have a choice between keeping their character from one expansion/campaign to the next, or to roll new ones. Each campaign is designed to take characters from 1st level to beyond 6th (how far beyond varies some, though always at least two post-6th feats), however I've got "heroic" stat blocks prepared if pretty much the whole party keeps their old characters.
Obviously, the benefits of keeping your old character are that you have a more powerful character at the beginning, but I'd like there to be an incentive for "trading" in your character and rolling a new one, and the two ideas I've come up with are, as the title implies, granting the new character a "legacy" (mythic tier) or "heirloom" (legendary item... probably). Of course, because of the difference in power between a non-mythic character and even the 1st mythic tier, if I go that route, I'll go ahead and give all characters from the start a mythic tier - possibly without the path, however, so they just have the basic mythic abilities. The paths would be offset by one tier, so when you get your 2nd mythic tier, you also pick a path at that point. There are some other alterations I might could make, as well, like perhaps having the path abilities the character gets be based on the character they're retiring (so a character playing a wizard who then rolls a rogue then gets an archmage path ability, and if they then retire that rogue to roll a barbarian they get to add a trickster ability - though I'd have to study the mythic rules closer to make sure this is remotely viable).
The other option I'm considering is to grant the new character a legendary item (Mythic Adventures, page 169). This has the advantage of also potentially allowing for a distinction between trading in multiple characters or "saving up" a character to trade in. Of course, I'm just kind of spit-balling ideas at the moment so this may be terribly unbalanced in one way or another, but I feel there's potential in it. To clarify, a character retired after one campaign grants a typical, baseline legendary item (with three legendary abilities). Retiring them after two campaigns instead grants a legendary minor artifact (granting six abilities), and after three campaigns grants a legendary major artifact (granting ten abilities). And, of course, multiple retired characters each grant their own individual heirloom.
In either case, the ultimate goal is to keep the new player from being too weak early on, but by the time they hit 6th level, being roughly on par with characters who have been 6th the whole time (and so have about 5 or more extra feats).