Dear ZOS,
I'd like to ask you to communicate about news earlier. Often news is made available only two days before something happens (events), or when it's already happening (crown store showcase). I also want to ask you to announce maintenance times in the game itself a couple days prior to its occurrence, rather than just the forums.
A lot of enmity from players towards you is not because you are not doing your job; you are doing your job. However, we don't know that you are doing your job because you don't communicate with us that you are doing your job. For instance, (speaking for myself here) a lot of tension was relieved when you opened a post earlier this year about what was happening to the EU server and what you were planning to do to fix it. Prior to that, all information we received from you could be summed up to "We are putting a queue in place", and I could see players getting upset on the forums. I ask that you be straightforward with us what you are doing.
While I have your attention anyway, could you tell me why a couple of things don't show up in patch notes? For instance, when the Frostvault update (iirc) was implemented, the patch notes said nothing about updating daily crafting writ reward coffers drops. While it was a pleasant surprise, it shouldn't have been a surprise. This loops back to my point about communication. I understand you cannot put every line of code that has changed in the patch notes (that would be too cumbersome to read), but the patch notes feel very short with almost every patch (which often takes 4+ hours to implement). The long down times along with the short patch notes are cause for tension in players such as myself as well. (I'm glad you are doing maintenance on your game though!)
My intent here is to help you improve communication between ZOS and players, not to cause further discord. Please keep this in mind when you (both ZOS and players) respond. I just want to help. However, if there are other points of communication either party would want to be improved upon, please let everyone know here!
May Kynareth guide you,
Ode2Order