The way they initially implemented Paragon Levels was a pure bandaid fix without much thought put into it. One tip off as to why I believe this is they no longer logged any experience once a character hit P100 (a forward looking system would have continued to tabulate total Paragon XP gains behind the scenes per character in the event they decided to raise that cap in the future).
Similarly, I have my doubts they are logging a “total Paragon XP” column in their database (again, as a forward looking design which took into the account that one day, they would make the system account wide) because if they were, they would’ve been able to elaborate on what they meant by retroactive from the get-go).
On softcore, that is pretty straight forward. With hardcore though, that’s a bit more complicated since it depends on what data remains stored for archived characters (certain extraneous data may end up being purged as a database space saving measure when moved to the graveyard). Reducing data storage requirements is why we can only archive a limited amount of characters, why we only have 10 character slots total to begin with, and why we can only undelete the last deleted character.
Deleted characters naturally are gone because I believe that all of that data (except for the last deleted one) is immediately purged. Thus when they said “retroactive”, I’ve interpreted that to mean whatever characters that are still selectable in the select hero screen (thus even a dead one that hasn’t been archived yet will still have all that data intact).
P.S. – Blizzard likely will not go down the Paragon XP/Point loss on hardcore death with this new system. Their design philosophy has avoided this (like with the rune skill system and being able to freely change without penalty albeit, loss of NV stack upon skill change). They’ve avoided means (outside of that failed repair cost increase pre-1.0.4) to make softcore deaths at least more meaningful. This same design philosophy is why Paragon points aren’t being made permanent once assigned.
On the hardcore side, the permanent loss of character and all it’s gear is considered punishment enough. I doubt they will go through the trouble of coding a different scenario (like loss of assigned Paragon points for that one particular character or loss of Paragon XP) just for hardcore.
And as someone else mentioned, part of this account wide system is likely their way of trying to placate some of the hardcore disconnect death issues (which would be sad solution because I’m a firm believer in addressing and fixing the root cause instead of just covering those issues up with a bandaid fix).
Thus I also agree that hardcore is pretty much just a secondary side show to the dev team. The quality assurance on this game is also atrocious (I’ve recommended in the past how they should provide a real reporting method such that reports can be performed in a more formalized manner by those of us who would like to make their QA engineers job much easier than their current method of having to wade through a large number of nonsensical postings on their support forums.
