Hi-Rez President Stew Chisam Isn't 100% Happy With SMITE Patch Quality, Announces Changes To Improve Them

Since SMITE entered Closed Beta in 2012, the dev team has grown from 18 to more than 100 developers, all working to push out approximately 24 updates a year. That's 24 on console and 24 on PC.

This stat comes from a recent Reddit post on the quality of said patches, made by Hi-Rez President Stew Chisam. According to Chisam, the amount of content patches pushed each year is a "herculean task" and obviously very impressive. But he's not entirely pleased with the quality of the patches that have been coming out.

In an effort to improve upon their current work, the SMITE dev team has decided to make some adjustments to how things will work, starting with patch 5.8.

The list of changes includes delaying the PC release of 5.8 by at least a week in order to spend more time in public testing. A lot of the focus in the list seems to be on making sure each update gets plenty of testing time. To accompany this, the team is also adding to the internal QA staff. So... Longer testing periods with more people to do it.

Speaking of which, to allow for even more players to aid in testing, the team is looking at expanding the PTS to include Steam -- and eventually consoles, but this is still a bit away from being implemented. Another idea tossed about includes rewarding players for helping out on the PTS. So, free stuffs?

Finally -- and this one is pretty important -- the SMITE community team will no longer post dates for when content is expected to release. This way, the team can spend all the time they need making sure they get it right, rather than letting things go to meet a deadline.

As noted in the post, these are just the first of the changes being made, as the team will continue to look at what else they can do in order to make things better. If you happen to have thoughts regarding this, players are already dropping theirs into the thread on Reddit. I'd suggest doing the same.