Hi-Rez President Stewart Chisam vows to improve SMITE’s patch quality

Every year brings a lot of patches for SMITE. A new official post on the game’s subreddit penned by Hi-Rez President Stewart Chisam puts the game at patching roughly 48 weeks in a year, which is pretty substantial. But it doesn’t matter all that much if the patches aren’t working right, and the post is essentially admitting that that has been the case more often than not lately; patches have beenreleased too early and without enough testing, making all of that speed mean less than nothing.

“Our current quality is not at all where it should be, and we strongly believe our quality can and should be better,” Chisam says. “We’ve been saying that for a while, and things have gotten better — but not good enough. So I think bigger changes are needed. We can’t keep doing things the same way and expecting different results.”

So the team is working on changing that, starting with a beefed up internal Q&A team.

There’s also a promise to have more public testing, including on Steam and on consoles, and an expectation of longer public test cycles. Beyond that, the team also wants to avoid announcing patch launches until they’re ready to happen, thus ensuring that people won’t be upset at “delays” when things need to get fixed. None of this means that patches will now be wholly without issues, but it should help improve overall patch quality for the future.