Ulykus
New Players are frequently complaining about low regeneration rates in ryzom. From my point of view regeneration doesn't matter very much cause when i am using my abilities they consume so much and i don't want to wait even a few seconds.
I think it would not hurt to double regen rates:
Most higher level players don't care about regen rates, they would need to be 20x higher to replace a healer.
Most low level players don't care about teams no matter how low their regen rates are nowadays.
And this would be a great opening for food and water.
Why not extend the existing food and water occupation to do two effects: The high regen they provide today shortly after consumption, and in addition another RL-hour (ingame day) of doubled regeneration.
So back to the idea: i would like to make our current regen stats the hungry/thirsty ones. They are quite low already.
One of the miscellaneous gameplay ideas we (Ryzom Core developers) put out for ideas for Summer of Code was a concept of consumables. I believe I stole this idea from the old "feedback" website. We called them "consumables" and figured they could be fun RP tools for a merchant at a bar or bazaar. The goal behind the idea (which was unfortunately never picked up) was to create a throw-away item type useful for role-playing that would also provide a dapper-sink.
I really like this idea of affecting regeneration rates though. I don't know if the Ryzom developers will touch this but I think I'll modify the vague idea on our ideas list to a full blown idea for the next Summer of Code. I believe I would formulate the idea similar to what you've described but make them more like 'potions' - where we can attribute brick parameter (technical jargon: http://dev.ryzom.com/projects/ryzom/wiki/BrickParameters which is a document in progress, apologies) to the item that is 'executed' upon consumption. This way we could have consumables which *may* affect your regeneration rates but don't necessarily.
Here are the miscellaneous gameplay ideas, FYI:
http://wiki.worldforge.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code#Miscellaneous_Game _Play_Additions