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[Koshirou]

1: Goals!

"Conquer some planets. And then at some point there's probably going to be an event. Or not." That doesn't work! We need a definite goal to work towards, and a time limit to get there.

In a 3025, five house set up, victory conditions for a given CW cycle would be easy to establish: "First house which conquers another house's homeworld wins", for example. In the current setup it's a bit more difficult. For the Clans, still easy enough. "Reach Terra within three months. First Clan to get there is MVF." A more fine-tuned approach with several steps which the Clans have to reach within certain time limits would work even better (so that we would not be stuck for weeks with a campaign one side can no longer win.)
If the main thrust of CW is to be IS vs Clans, you can leave it at that, but that would leave the southern houses limited to defense.

You could forego the idea of conquest for the IS houses, but allow all houses to participate in counterattacks on Clan held worlds - a victory would automatically revert them back to the original owner. (The idea being that if, for example, a Steiner unit helped liberate an FRR world, they'd probably hand it back to FRR civilian control afterwards.)
Or, if you want to have intra-IS warfare, you could give the houses individual goals. (For example, for Marik and Liao, to regain some of their pre-4th war territories.)

Or, my favorite idea, you could ditch lore and have one Clan attack from each of the cardinal directions. First Clan to reach Terra wins. First IS faction to conquer X worlds from their neighbours wins. Whatever happens first.

But in any event: We need some idea of the endgame. Otherwise the map is meaningless.

2: Incentives!

As far as C-Bills and XP are concerned, CW is still somewhat lacking, but passable. Ranks are fine, but they become somewhat static over time. What we need, IMHO, are more mini-events which can be used to steer the direction of CW and give players a sense of achievement.

3. Variety!

This is crucial. The single game mode in CW (with one variant) tends to become repetitive. There is more variety in game modes in public games even. Off the top of my head, I could think of:
- Destruction type game modes such as the one we have now.
- Mixed modes. You get victory points both for destroying enemy Mechs and for taking out objectives.
- Zone control type game modes, where the attacker has to proceed to take control of various objectives.
- Evacuation game mode. Defender has to break through towards a heavily defended dropzone. Rescue more Mechs than you lose.
- Resource gathering. Load up your Mechs with loot, bring it back to the DZ, rinse and repeat.