The Sims 3 assistant producer Graham Nardone has posted a new blog entry on TheSims3.com in which he discusses game updates, bug reporting, listening to comments and more:
From time to time, we provide an update to The Sims 3, which helps to improve your game. We incorporate design improvements, including some that have been suggested by Simmers, as well as fixes for outstanding issues. Anything from obscure bugs we have found and fixed to driver updates and also new hardware support can be included in these updates. As you can imagine, game updates are complex and play a major role in our testing and engineering process as each change has to work across all variations of The Sims 3 products. We have a very dedicated QA team that continuously strives for accuracy and efficiency in identifying, understanding and implementing what needs to go into these updates.