When Sea of Thieves first launched in 2018 there was one food type, bananas. they healed 30 health (what coconuts heal now) at the time, it was simple and effective.
And then they added all the new food. In theory this adds an element of resource management. in practice its resulted in the nightmarish world of horking down pineapples we now reside in.
1: It turns lots of fights into a war of attrition
Now, a war of attrition obviously isn't bad, but its quite annoying that if your first hourglass match on a streak runs long, and your opponent went through all their food as well, you're condemned to restocking at a sea fort or outpost. On some level restocking is obviously a part of the game, but food particularly creates a scenario where you're at a massive disadvantage if you lack high tier food items that are also not nearly as abundant as other critical supply items such as basic cannonballs and planks. Pineapples in theory should be more on par with rarity of chainshot, but instead, albeit due to the various duplication glitches, there is a disparity where ships that have been on for an hour or two have hoards of pineapples to tank tons of damage with, and ships just spawning in do not. also, running out of chainshots puts you at a disadvantage, but running out of high-tier food can often make fights completely unwinnable as you cannot heal fast enough to regain cannon pressure, and the nature of the foods design makes it "snowball" where you end up further and further on the backfoot eating more and more of your food. A lot of this can be dismissed as skill issues and that would be a fair point, but how hard does the game really need to be? leading into my second point
2: It has a detrimental effect on the TTK
10 full heals to 100 health in one inventory slot compared the launch 5 heals of 30 health ( 150 health total) is absolutely insane, the fact that this was ever added without considering the initial weapon balance has baffled me since launch.
There are a couple of options for dealing with these problems, the first is simply a direct nerf of the healing amount, something like this:
Bananas: 25 health (current - 20)
Coconuts: 30 health (current - 30 )
Pomegranates: 35 health (current - 40)
Mangos: 40 health (current - 50)
Pineapples/Meg/Kraken: 40 health, two bites (current - 100)
Other Meat: 30 health, two bites (current - 50)
The second option, remove the ability to buy high tier food as captains supplies and make it a much rarer spawn, 30 pineapples should be a ridiculous amount, not the "norm" after an hour or two of looting.
the third option is the most complex and most unlikely but I wanted to include it anyway, making the extra food types have alternative effects besides healing, for example:
Bananas: Healing
Coconuts: Temporary Dexterity (Increased digging speed, reload speed, etc)
Pomegranates: Feed to a dead teammate to revive them at full health
Mangos: Clear status effects (Poison, drunkeness)
Pineapples: Increased movement speed.
