Sony adding Trophies to the PS3 is great for achievement whores. Sucks that you must go back and re-play your old PS3 titles to get those newly added Trophies. Blizzard is likewise adding achievements to the upcoming World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King expansion. But! Blizzard isn't making you go back and re-do a damn thing. Blizzard's new Achievements will be retroactive. So if you played World of Warcraft or The Burning Crusade before, you should be good to go! Explains WoW designer Jeffrey Kaplan:
We retroactively track any quest Achievements or any Achievement for an item which is either on your character or in your bank... There are a lot of Achievements based on stuff like honorable kills or reputations. We have all that tracked.
Very cool. There are some gray area Achievements that won't be retroactive. Kaplan explains: "There's a quest associated with killing Onyxia, like the turn-in-her-head quest... We know if you've done that, but the problem is, not everybody who's killed Onyxia has necessarily gotten the head and turned it in. So there's a fairness issue. It's like, 'Well, I raided with these guys but Bob got the head and then he turned it in.' And then when the Achievement goes live, his Achievement will be filled out but mine won't. So there might be understandability issues there like, 'Well, how come he got it but I didn't?' So that's something we're actually feeling out in the beta. I'm torn on that right now." Man, I hate when Bob hogs all the credit.
Kaplan Talks Achievements [Multiplayer via 1Up]