I think the next major escalation level will be Thargoid on foot combat.
And many "ships in system xy" escalation steps before that.
That's too soon I think, but we will start seeing more aggression soon if I'm reading these coffee grounds correctly

. At any rate, this idea would give peeps a valid reason to pvp without ganking etc. There would need to be certain rules of course. Such as, no parties/wings. Limit the number of players proportionally to the number of players active in open. There would also be the obvious problem of players letting their buds blow them up for xp to solve. For this, I'd think death for the Thargoid would remove the player from the thargoid ranks and place them back in que, and the player cant choose where they spawn. Jump range limited to 15 Lyrs. Also, players running a Thargoid would be on a kill timer, so if you don't have a kill in say 30 minutes, your booted back and have to rejoin the que. If you score a kill the timer might reset, or maybe your put at the head of the que allowing you to instantly respawn when your timer is up.
In contrast, while other (non Thargoid) players wont be able to identify a player Thargoid from npc's, The payout would be higher... just off the hip say double that of an NPC. Also Player Thargoid ships would have lower health than an npc.
Note that a player would que up for this in much the same way you search for a cqc match while in game. The player would be required to be in open.