Excerpt from a new IGN article:
IGN: You've released some statistics publically, but did anything, from those stats or elsewhere, particularly surprise you?
Jim: It surprised me that, quite honestly, Trenches was so horribly broken, despite hours of testing internally. I'm glad that we did the beta for that reason. Now we know and it didn't have to go out and be map that's a failure in the wild. Now I'm more confident that will be a successful map. I think the only thing that really surprised me when it shouldn't have was some people's reactions to the new weapons simply because they're so attached to previous Gears that they were unwilling to try and learn the new stuff, they just wrote them off as being broken. Whereas in the long term the stats actually showed that they were pretty well balanced. It's just a matter of people having enough time to get comfortable and learn to enjoy their subtleties and wonderful executions.
Rod: If I were to pick my thing, it was that sort of uniform reaction that every weapon in the beta was overpowered. We were having a meeting in my office and I got a tweet as the meeting was going on that said 'the flame grenades are overpowered' and I said, 'that's it, it's official, every weapon in our beta is now overpowered.' We're the ones that have to bring the logic, we're the ones that have the rational and reasonable thinking because what's happening is that the person who's a Gnasher player complains that every rifle is overpowered because someone is actually able to get a kill.
I was talking to a guy about this where he was saying a friend of his was complaining how horribly broken the Retro Lancer and Sawed-Off Shotgun are. He was like 'really?' 'Yeah, come and watch I want to show you how broken these weapons are.' He begins this rampage where he kills seven guys and one guy shoots him and after seven kills he dies once. 'See that? &*$% Sawed-Off shotgun. I hate that weapon.' Then he goes again and kills nine guys, then after nine kills in a row he gets killed by a guy with a Retro Lancer and says, 'see told you! Look how broken it is.' It's that kind of perception. 'Nothing should kill me if my play style is supposed to be successful.' So the Gnasher guys are all, 'that rifle sucks' and all the rifle guys are like, 'the Gnasher sucks.' There was no overwhelming message of 'oh, obviously we have to change something' it was 'wow, you really have to take into perspective the context of how people play.'