Put a little network traffic box in the top corner of the screen like is Quake. IE something that shows ping, but also packet drops. That sort of thing. It would help us all know when our connection is going south.

the devs had a neat ping graph thingy back in the day but i don't know what happened to it.

+1 That is a great idea, it would be good to have a little warning before dropping out the game.

Many games have a CVAR to show a network traffic as color-coded area graphic...
+1 to add an optional network/FPS graph display. Make it allways display in Configuration(network/video) tabs.

This isn't what you're looking for, but there is a graph of at least FPS, maybe other things as well, I don't really remember. I only used it once, a few months ago, so I'm a bit foggy. I think you do something like:
/showfps
/showgraph
(fps has to be shown or the graph doesn't appear)

The result, IIRC, is a trippy green graph overlayed over your screen. Like I said, not quite what you're looking for.

OP is just like that, by adding something like

/showPING

Then, one can decide if he wants also FPS with
/showfps
/showgraph

And two lines appear in screen, one for FPS, another for latency...

There's already

/ping

which will display your current ping, though this is not active just a single readout. Could easily be made into an active ping plugin and save the devs some work.

/fps

already displays active frames per second, updated realtime(?)

/toggleframerategraph

displays active framerate graph

full list of commands here:
http://www.vendetta-online.com/manual/app_commands.html

All of you jerks don't get it. I want to know when I'm dropping packets. Forget all this fancy BS - just put ping and PL on a graph so I know when my connection is going to pot or if it's the other guy.

It's tossing all this extra crap that makes nothing happen.