This is one of those really large topics that I feel I could write an entire thesis about, but the more I think about it the more I realize less is better.

At it's simplest, the only question I have for the devs is: What direction do you want to take the game? There are countless suggestions here every day that get completely ignored while the devs make and revert change after change after change, but there remains little to no communication about why, long-term, these changes are being made. Most of the developer comments read something like, "This was over/underperforming in certain content so it's getting adjusted," which for most things is fine, but we've clearly hit a point where your community has lost their bearings on what you intend this game to be. Just off the top of my head, here are a few hot-topic issues the devs themselves have acknowledged that have been abandoned for months or even years:

-Class Identity: This was mentioned back in 2019 in this article, where Gameplay Lead Rob discusses the access each class has to each role, and more importantly, the different styles and mechanics each class uses to achieve their main goal. To this day, tank and healer builds are nearly identical across all six classes, with DPS having only slightly more variation based on the specific encounter and the option to go full stam or mag. With U35, this will become even more prevalent as DoTs and HoTs will now all have the same duration, giving each class a similar tempo.

-Overland Difficulty: This topic has its own pinned thread on the forums, started in November of 2021. There are 128 pages of discussion on this thread. Not a single change has been proposed since.

-PvP: As a whole, discussion about PvP and its future both in Cyrodiil and BGs has been largely ignored by the devs. While we do know there is some back-end redesigning going on, there has been nothing of note regarding changes or additions planned for PvP after the overhaul is done. This is a mode that hasn't seen new content in 3 years, and that was just a single map. A dedicated PvP game would be dead with that level of neglect, and given the queue times for BGs these days, I'm guessing that's what's happening here.

It's been said thousands of times by now, but by far the worst part of ZoS is your communication. Players are left entirely in the dark about the true state of the game, while you the devs claim to have a "broader plan" that nobody, including yourselves, seems to know about. If all these things you write and talk about are in fact important enough to acknowledge, then why are they not important enough to follow up on? The craziest part to me is that this just encompasses combat. There is an entire other half of the game between crafting, the justice system, antiquities, and now Tales of Tribute, the first two which have been completely disregarded while antiquities has already fallen into routine cash-grab territory. I can't see ToT having a much brighter future at this point.

At the end of the day though, all of this comes down to one single request for the devs, which is just talk to us. Without the PR filter, the reservations, the abstraction ("Power deltas", like what?). Just be honest about where you want to see the game go and how you want to get there. This game has so many different limbs already, but none of them complement each other. It's time to start putting the pieces together rather than just tacking on more and more. For me personally, I would distill my main wishes for ZoS to just two things: Quality over quantity, and communication. Just those two principles I believe would make a world of difference for this game that we all love so dearly.

P.S. Trust has to be earned. Four years of bait-and-switches is not how you do it.