The issue:
LW lacks small storytelling elements.
My suggestion is to add 'randomly generated' quests, with small story elements in the 3 sword areas in the campaign. Excluding the den area. The random generation would refer to the items asked for in the quest, as a little bit of randomness would help with the large pool of items in the game and keep it varied.
Quests should become available after completing the campaign at each pack region.
The miniquests would be generated to the appropriate difficulty depending on the sword area!
So If there was a quest where a wolf requests a full suite of armour: the first area would ask for copper, the second area for iron or silver, and the third for mithril or lorium.
If there was a wolf asking for a snack, the first area would ask for cooked pond-level fish, the later areas would ask for higher-level recipes.
etc.
The mini quest presents as a wolf in trouble, which you can choose to talk to or ignore.
The quest should not be a press-one-button and accept the situation, give us some time to enjoy the game's writing. Have the wolf present us with a situation and give us some differing options on how to react to it or options that may change the quest requirements.
The mini-quests would be styled like scavenger hunts, so you have to get certain items or even apparel pieces that are thematic to the quest. If they involve professions, even better.
There is little reason to keep crafting apparel beyond what you need. There is no need to cook many of the complex recipes and why grow the low-efficiency crops?
Well maybe miniquests could entice you to.
The quests should also be different depending on the pack area.
The items asked for, while the categories can be static, should be random.
You can only have 3 quests at a time.
Once you have three quests, you no longer encounter quests in the campaign. This is important so people aren't overwhelmed with a lot of quests, and also important so people who don't want to encounter quests merely fill up their quest list to no longer get them.
You turn in your quests in the den areas of the pack regions.
While you could just turn them in the quest list, I want to get some more story from it. I want to see the wolf thank me for that nice new shiny suit of armour, or I want to read how we had a nice lunch with the food I brought etc. I want to feel like I'm still helping around the packs beyond just the main story campaign.
Rewards need to be appropriate!
People would be happy for a nice xp boost, especially since they could turn in the quest with different wolves (like those they want to level up) than those they acquired it with.
Having a proper pebble reward would be nice, but it should always be way more than what the items are auto-sold for.
People might enjoy unique quest rewards, but I think people would also be happy with a random pool of trinkets as a bonus to the above.
Maybe you can get quest(or pack specific quest) vouchers you can trade in for items, but I'd rather see the Arena have some more unique items and love before something like this would be implemented.
Other musing:
Miniquests can have their own achievements. For how many you did in each territory, per level area and how many you cancelled lol.
They should be about as common as wild wolf encounters.
Maybe questing has its own level, and with a higher level you unlock more varied miniquests...maybe even quests with a bit more complex aspects of the story, possibly at milestones..!
I think this is all I have for it.
