(Reddit does headers differently than github gist so the sections aren't visually split very well here but I included a link in a comment to the original gist which is significantly more readable, didn't put it here bc I think it got this flagged for approval)

Maybe I'm just a pilot with a pipe dream of a player filled universe of space truckers and their armed bounty hunter escort, pirates looking to score off the trader and his voucher-laden guards, explorers calling in for escort as they re-enter the bubble, pilots fighting tooth and nail for their power play faction. Open Play could be so so so much more. I don't expect all or even any of these recommendations to be taken 100% seriously. At the very least, I hope they inspire more discussion.

Document starts here

This document is a work in progress

Document Purpose

This document is designed to lay out a list of gameplay changes to Elite
Dangerous to revamp and repopulate Open Play and provide a much more enriching
gameplay experience and encourage more cooperative and competitive
play between commanders, while also being implementable within the bounds of reason.
We can't expect Frontier to jump through huge development hoops for minor things.
Changes should also not impact those who would still prefer playing in Solo.

While the main goal of this document is to bring more players into Open Play,
an equally important goal is giving existing "gankers" meaningful and potentially
lucrative ways to PvP rather than just mindlessly murdering anyone in sight. Not a
slight against them, there's just not many fun and meaningful ways to PvP
currently.

I've ordered the changes by what I perceive is there impactfulness towards the goal,
but some may rely on one another to be worthwhile.

Abbhreviations

• PvP: Player versus Player
• PvE: Player versus Environment
• PP: Power Play

Open Play Financial Incentive

Purpose

• Give players more of a reason to play in Open
• A lot of the other changes rely on this incentivizing and lock-in of mode

Design

Currently, you can jump back and forth between Open and Solo/Private freely
and there exists no incentive to play in Open outside of "feeling like part of the galaxy"
and seeing other commanders, which is enough for many of us, but with the lack of avenues for
meaningful PvP, Open has become filled with commanders killing indiscriminately for no real
gain and has pushed so many into Solo or private groups.

To bring back these players, there needs to be some kind of financial incentive.
For any activity done in Open Play, you get a 25% (exact amount up for debate) bonus
on all payouts and double powerplay merit gain and power play influence. Now there's the obvious
issues with this considering a player could for example buy a bunch of commodities in
Solo and travel to their destination station and jump back to Open. So I propose the
following system:

When in a specific mode, you are locked into that mode while you are in
possession of the following:
– Bounty Vouchers
– Combat Bonds
– Exploration Data
– Merit Vouchers
– Commodities (except Limpets of course)
– Missions
– Bounty (as in, Wanted somewhere)
– This is up for debate. See this section here

So to switch modes, you must finish up what you've started before changing.
This way, there's no cheating the financial incentive by bouncing between
modes. This also of course helps keep Open Play populated since you cannot
leave Open Play until you finish what you started and leaves Solo players happy
since their gameplay has not changed.

Escorts of heavily armed and experienced pilots would become a popular profession
and a very enjoyable and meaningful way to PvP.

Destroyed Players Drop a Black Box With a Portion of their Bounty Vouchers and Cartographic Data

Purpose

• One of the most popular professions in this game is bounty hunting and
  commanders can quickly obtain a mountain of bounty vouchers. Allowing other
  commanders to hunt these bounty hunters in popular bounty hunting destinations.
• Incentivize PvP
• Pirates have another form of piracy
• Bounty Hunter.. Hunter.
• Explorers are now encouraged to reach out to other commanders for
  escort while inside the bubble.

Design

Killing a bounty hunter (NPC or Commander) leaves all those bounties unclaimed.
Instead, allow the attacker to take claim of those bounties. The amount
should be reduced in PvP however to avoid just trading vouchers bewteen
players. Personally I'd say maybe 75% but 50% would even still be
worth it considering how much players often stack. Dropped amount would not
include Powerplay bounty bonsues from certain powers. Could cause some pirate
in-fighting over who gets to grab it or a cheeky buzzard swoops in and scoops it
up and gets chased down by the pirates. Or maybe a friend of the destroyed commander
manages to recover it and escape! So many gameplay possibilities.

Whether you have to bring the blackbox in and whether it takes up cargo space is
up for debate. I think requiring it to be taken to a station and take up a slot
would make cargo racks for pirates still a necessity and would force the player
to have to consider compromises on their internals for cargo space. This leads to
better balancing bewteen certain strong PvP ships with few internals compared to
ships better suited for pirating, which encourages more ship variety and that's
always a win.

Better Compensation For Killing Other Commanders in Combat Zones

Purpose

• More incentive for Open Play and meaningful PvP

Design

The amount of credits you get for defeating another commander in a combat zone
should be based on the following (with example formula)
– Ship insurance cost (a)
– Target Combat Rating (b) (where 1 is harmless, 2 is mostly harmless, 14 is Elite V etc)
– Your Combat Rating (c) (where 1 is Elite V, and harmless is 14, etc)

For example, the formula ((1/4)a * log_base_2((1/2)b))/c. This would guarantee
the return will always be less than the cost of the insurance including
powerplay discounts to avoid abuse while being able to also scale with rating.
Just an example formula, not saying THIS is the one but care needs to be
taken to avoid abuse. At the very least, the formula should never pay out
more than ~75% of ship insurance (including PP bonuses), and should not
allow easy stacking of credits on new accounts.

An alternative to this would be to replace the ship insurance scaling with
the NPC payouts by ship and factor in the current total bonds the destroyed player
had in some way. So if a player has been dealing a huge blow in the war,
factions will pay out more for their destruction.

Rework Notoriety

Purpose

• With more meaningful PvP, we don't want to punish other commanders as harshly
  but still want there to be weight for their actions

Design

• Take away ATR's cheat weapons first off. Give them reverberating cascade torpedos
  if you really need them to have this ability. Hell, have them deploy a support
  Federal Gunship outfitted entirely in them at high notoriety if you really want to.
• ATR takes longer to respond, and trickle in slowly.
• Bounty reward scales multiplicitively with notoriety level.
  (Max probably no more than x2 or x3 at max notoriety)
• Notoriety max increased (50?, 100?) but decays 1 point every 30 minutes.
• Notoriety gain from killing a commander is 4x that of killing an NPC.
• Missions that require murdering clean ships should still increase notoriety
  • With ATR not being as insanely oppressive I think this is reasonable
• Just noting, given that the only way to undermine in PP in some scenarios is to
  fully destroy clean ships, this should probably continue to not accrue notoriety.

Lots of numerical changes mentioned, the exact numerical changes are
up for debate of course.

Bounty Decay (this one's complicated)

Purpose

• Better synergy with the above changes
• Like the good ol' days

Design

You currently have to pay off your bounties or just live with them forever,
which would not make for a great experience with the mode lock in changes,
basically meaning you cannot change your mode unless you pay up. However,
this can cause some issues, see this section here
That said, notoriety should reset this decay.

Commodities in Hold Have a Chance to Survive Ship Destruction

Purpose

• Some realism, give desperate pirates a chance at getting a fraction
  of the haul in case they destroy their target or know they have no
  chance of getting them to drop their haul.

Design

Pretty self-explanatory but the rate should be kept very low, maybe 5% of the
cargo survives on average. We wouldn't want this to be the goto method for pirates.

Additional Notes

Bounties and Lock-in Mechanic

So we know there's many commanders out there who pride themselves on their sizeable
bounty (and make any bounty hunter drool with anticipation) and making that difficult to
maintain would hurt more than help. But maybe if you want to accrue an insane bounty
and maintain it, you SHOULD be locked into Open Play, and I imagine most of those
commanders that pride themselves on their bounty would likely be doing this anyway.

Logging off and waiting for the 'low' times

I imagine this would come up in discussions, yes they are locked into Open, but
nothing is stopping them from logging off and coming back during the lowest
activity hours to finish a delivery or escape to the far end of the bubble. To that,
I say is realism! In my mind, they found a planet to land on and chilled their for a
while until the coast was clear, or low waked in an empty system and took a nap.