@theadmin: The decision to go live after a beta is roughly the same for any site: What does the majority of the feedback (from all channels) look like? If we go live, will people still be able to accomplish the core use cases? Are there any blocking bugs? What do the usage patterns look like?
Ultimately though, a lot of problems with a new site don't really come to light (or aren't fully understood) until people are using it 100% of the time, so extended beta periods with small sample sizes are often counterproductive in that they can lead to fine tuning where it isn't necessary and errors in prioritization due to sample bias.
It's a similar situation for the concept of "old.giantbomb." If we were to spend time making the old site compatible with the new data structures and fixing bugs people find there, we'd be taking time away from development on the new site, and that's clearly not a good situation.
Could we have made the beta period longer? Sure. That said, when looked at it as a whole, feedback was positive, and site usage patterns since the redesign have actually improved. The feedback within this forum also has a sample bias - one may not get a complete picture of how the site was received just by looking here.
That said, the folks in this forum are the most frequent users and are important to us, and we understand many of you are still looking for some features to be fixed, so we're working on those as I type this. Thanks again for your patience and understanding.
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