Yeah I wasn't expecting it to be very long, just 2 seconds or even less for the Saiyans.
modeling the characters to have a descending animations
You wouldn't need to change the model, just adding one, 2 second animation per character, it wouldn't take long to implement and it's not going to increase the file size by any more than 1 meg at most and it would make the game look and feel smoother.
Surely the fact that it's in beta stage means a better chance to add stuff (and suggest stuff to add) and make the game better?
And as for 'ping fluctuations' and 'fps drop', do you know what a sprite is? This is akin to firing an energy attack, and if a server lagged every time somebody used an energy attack I doubt people would play ESF.
If the team was so worried about that then I doubt Goku's trans would have rocks flying, lightning, sounds, shockwaves and awesome animation.
Just for the record, Half-Life's Multiplayer minimum requirements are:
Windows 95 (Todays Standard: XP or 2000)
Pentium 133 (Todays Standard: Pentium 4-AMD Athlon 3000+)
24mb RAM (Todays Standard: 512mb-1gb)
No Graphics Card (Todays Standard: Geforce 4-Radeon 9200)
2X Speed CD Rom (Todays Standard: 50X)
56k Modem (Todays Standard: 128k+)
So unless your computer was built 5 years ago you really won't have problems.