I want crossbows too. Very much so!

Though I'd rather see them as alternate weapon in the current "Bow" skill line (maybe renamed to something that encompass both... "archery"?) - perhaps with a delay after firing (as you reload), but with more built-in armor penetration... my main character would very gladly trade in her bow for a crossbow as her secondary weapon!

And yes... spears would be nifty as well. Ever since someone first noticed the fighters guild sparring in Skywatch this has been asked for... one hopes that someday we might get a "polearm" weapon line...
I mean, come on... between the people who watched Hector and Achilles fight in "Troy" and the ones who saw the fight between Gregor "The Mountain" Clegane and Oberyn "Red Viper" Martell in "Game of Thrones"... there have to be quite a few who'd want to pattern their characters after some awesome spearwielders, right? And all that should give the developers some nifty ideas for a skill line...

And in any case, woodworking -really- needs some more things to work on, they have a mere -six- compared to the other equipment crafting lines -fourteen- things to make & research... adding crossbows and polearms would at least get the wood polishers closer...

How about they fix the game first? So many things are still broken. Skills are broken, questing bugs need fixed, pvp population needs consolidated, bank and guild bank bugs need fixed. Basically your asking for more broken ***.

I can put up with small bugs now and then. For me, ESO is pretty neat in that regard, most times - most of the bugs I stumble over are usually fixed by the time one of my alts comes to the same quest/place/occurence. And the few that persist, I usually find workarounds or they are uncommon enough that I can endure without them being more then a stumble in my gameplay.

Putting up with no new content? Now that would be harder... if the game gets boring through endless repetirion of known stuff, I too might fall asleep at the monitor and faceplant in my tea mug or something

Putting up with people who -have- to state the super-obvious "fix the bugs" every time we discuss new content options? Without breaking forum code of cunduct? Harder still...

Back to crossbows...

Traditionally they had the same range as bows - for direct fire. Bows just had way more range for indirect fire, which also required more training - one of the main advantages of crossbows was that they were way easier to handle. A archer would need years of training to reliably hit someone on the battlefield, a crossbowman could do the same with mere weeks or practice. And the crossbows had as much if not more armor penetration as the best longbows, if a somewhat lower rate of fire.
One notable and mentioned design was the chinese repeating crossbow, which sort of sacrificed power and accuracy for rate of fire, shooting a number of bolts from an integral magazine... it kinda was the submachinegun of the medieal world

But for ESO... the best way I can think of was to merely add some generic crossbows as alternate weapon option to the "bow" skill line. Maybe with some changes in some skills... much like swords/maces/axes have different effects in some other skill lines.

In fact, they might add more ranged options too... I would love to see slings become available as well, they are an often forgotten weapon, that was used to good effect throughout a lot of ancient history... (darn, now I imagine a special sling artifact that does double damage against giant-kin... ) And might be even more useful if you add magic to the mix.
Same for throwing javelins... though those would also have way shorter range, though more punch.

One possible way to make ranged weapons differ would be the damage types... right now, "bow" is heady on poison damage, could be that crossbows might use disease damage instead (smearing nasty stuff on projectiles for added effect is a historical fact), while slings could for example use fire (as in, basically using small magical/alchemical grenades as sling bullets?), while throwing javelins could use, say, lightning (Zeus would approve...)
Just some ideas.

i want a god damn bazooka

arquebus FTW