I say take it down. Take the forums down as well. Do a player wipe and relaunch the game when its actually not a beta.

It "could" speed up development. Simply by not having to worry about all the people keeping the gear/stats/levels and having to tip toe around making any huge changes to the worthless armory system. Running the game means people are playing something that could change. And the developers have to tip toe around not making those people angry. So that does slow down development and may down right kill some ideas from ever being implemented.

Who cares if taking the servers down signals that the game failed... i think most people would agree that it failed a while ago.

And no one cares "Well if they do a player wipe i won't come back!".. You knew this was a beta when you first logged in, and even if you're slow you surely realized it after a week. Not to mention if you've had fun and have multiple r50's... you'd try the game again when it came back up. And besides, who cares if the small amount of players who are playing get pissy and don't come back if they launch a game that is actually good? Hell, those same people like kam keep saying "if you don't like it leave"... as the game dies from people doing just that.