How does the game currently discourage people from playing in open?
I mean, sure, if you're absolutely min-maxing every last bit of credit earnings, other players about can slow you down just by existing (it's a lot easier to dock in a station instance you've just created than one that's been busy for a while and can have ships coming out of the station ... or they can compete with you for kills in a CZ or RES) - but most people aren't doing that.
Other players may discourage playing in Open in a very narrow set of systems, but the rest of the galaxy it doesn't matter - I see plenty of people in Open all the time, who presumably are there because being able to meet other people is an encouragement to play in Open.
For a trade good to encourage piracy/escort behaviour it would need to be extremely profitable indeed, and also only traded between a small set of ports (because if it's tradeable widely, the chance of actually meeting a pirate is tiny). Current maximum trade profits in ideal circumstances are about 50 million credits per hour, maybe a little higher. So it would need to be at least two or three times more profitable (maybe ~30k/tonne profit and very high supply/demand levels) to make up for the inconvenience of:
- having to actually form and keep pace with your escort wing
- potentially losing some of it to piracy/murder
But then ... Fleet Carriers! Park your Fleet Carrier next to the purchase station, use wing nav lock to very rapidly switch between station safe zone and carrier safe zone with minimal supercruise time until the carrier's hold is full, jump the Fleet Carrier next to the sell station, do the same at the other end. A well-shielded Cutter can make that short a trip without needing an escort or sacrificing much cargo space, and lots of traders can use a single carrier. A little bit of the now exceptionally large trade profit can be used to easily fund the carrier itself.