E

in 10 years
Getting rid of p2p, it'll play entirely on "the cloud."
All ships will be Cobra variants, even so, the Asp Ex will still be the most popular ship
As part of the season 7 update, "Friendship Drive", you have to make at least 2 friendly posts to other players on their Galspan Social Media page before you can make long jumps.
There will be multiple forms of currency based on each occupation that allow players to buy specialized equipment that often have nothing to do with that profession.
Piracy will once again be a problem as pvp players spend their "Explorer Bucks" to buy "Solomode Tunnelers" to invade solomode. To defend against this, solo players can spend their "PvP Coins" to purchase "Tunnel Shields".
All trade goods will be replaced with "Printer Cartridges" for 3d printers that have replaced all forms of production. In most station economies, "Printer Cartridges" are spent producing more "Printer Cartridges" to sell as the economy slowly enters its final death spiral.
Most stars have run out of fuel long ago causing the Fuel Rats to expand into towing services as stations have infinite fuel as long as they have printer cartridges. A few still live on the edge, collecting fuel from the few remaining fuel producing stars but are being hunted down by Aislings current activist campaign "Stop Eating Stars You Stupid Meanie".
Everyone continues waiting for the Thargoids to reveal themselves while the majority of Frontier's dev staff no longer even remembers what that word means and just makes vague posts about it to keep riots from breaking out
The UA's, Barnacles and the season 3 discovery of Starfish have all been revealed to be a creation of Hudson to distract everyone from his secret affair with Torval
The Powerplay mechanic has been changed dramatically and power rankings are now determined by SRV races, the type of race and location determined by last weeks winner
NPC pilots Ai have been upgraded and now contain highly advanced conversational code borrowed from Microsoft. As such, all npc pilots are now very chatty but also racist bigots.
Lastly, Exploration has been drastically changed since season 6 "LIMPETS FOR EVERYONE!" as everyone now employs Exploration Limpets which zoom around sectors scanning everything for you and beams the information back to your ship, even if you're in another sector