Let's see......
One day I read about RO in a TINY little blurb in MacAddict (seriously, it was this little thing of <50 words and a postage-stamp sized screenie; I'd scan it if I could find the damned issue....) and thought that it looked pretty neat. However I didn't have UT2k3 at the time and wasn't planning on buying it since 2K4 was going to be released in a few months anyway (at this point I was really more interested in UT; mods were secondary) After that I pretty much forgot about RO. When UT2K4 finally came out, I bought it. After a couple of weeks of playing, I started thinking about mods and remembered "that neat sounding WW2 mod I read about a long time ago"
I dug up the old copy of MacaAddict and got the url. It was acouple of weeks after the release of 2.0, and the video demonstrating the new MG-34 made me drool
After seeing it deployed and the barrel change (OMG THAT IS SOO COOL!!!
~~ I thought) I HAD TO download it and try it. Once I started playing it, I realized that it was OMGWTF-AWESOME, and after the customary week of getting my ass handed to me, I was totally hooked; it pretty much instantly became my number-one game that sucked in all of my free time.
As time went on, RO just got better and better with each release, except for perhaps the occasional major bug, but those were always fixed quickly
Back in the 2.0 days there were still many features to be added to RO, and I enjoyed the massive threads where people would argue about how much better adding tank would make RO or how much it would destroy the gameplay (These things would go on for 30-50 pages, they were real monsters, but somehow they managed to remain intelligent and on-topic for most of the time)
When 3.0 and tank finally were introduced, while innovative, they were really clunky and hard too use, although still a lot of fun to use. As RO progressed to 3.3 They just got more and more polished, as well as pretty much everything else ingame.
With the release of Ostfront, I was effectively cut off from RO since steam requires windows
However, I bought a copy anyway (Since RO is just THAT COOL!!!) and my friend was kind enough to allow me to essentially rape his hard drive with it (His comp was brand-spanking new, and I was fragmenting his hard drive's pristine bits with 2 gigs of a game that he was going to delete after I was done playing it) and play for a couple of hours
Somehow, the devs managed to make Ostfront a hundred times awesomer than ever!
I'm pretty sure that in the futre, RO will just keep getting better and better, culminating hopefully with a version on the UE 3.0 engine.