I like this poll, and I think it's one of the more loaded/most important polls in that it's a simple question of "When did you like this game the most?"
This, being asked when the mod seems to be on a steady decline. Admittedly, I haven't been in a server in like a month. Been busy IRL, and sadly will remain busy for the next 7 weeks.
But I think the questions could be a bit more specific. I look at the Battle server and the Strat servers as (almost) two different games: I enjoy the Battle Server mechanics of strat 4+, though I must note that I am not a fan of the most recent uber-patch. But, I had more fun playing Strat's 2 and 3 that the most recent iteration.
My preference for the past Strat's probably comes from a mix of nostalgia, the sense of "Oh this is new(ish) and fun!" that I (and perhaps others) felt at the time, and the general cRPG population's investment into strat at the time. I feel that past iterations of strat had more players giving a fuck than the most recent iterations. This is perhaps tied into my own, very personal, take on the earlier strats: they were more immersive. I was invested in them, and could better imagine the conflicts between clans being carried out, like some retarded, nerdy Game of Thrones; hence the inception of my "roleplaying". I think this ease of imagining--this immersion--was so easily accomplished back then because of a mix of the aforementioned factors, plus strat's relative youth and healthy population. A number of factors blended together, back in the day, to make those earlier strats more immersive for me. I care more about them, to the point that clan identies and heraldries and the players that led them all mattered. I kept track of that shit like I was tracking the arcs of characters (and their factions) in a weird, nerdy fucking soap opera.
Shit, my "roleplay" posts often required an hour of digging through forums (and my own memory) to figure out who was doing what, and what faction was aligned with which. Verisimilitude and all that. I still fucked that part up frequently, but the impulse to at least try was there, which is telling. It suggests that the battle-by-battle, post-by-post reality of previous strat iterations was indeed very important to me, and important to the stories I tried to tell (and to the implied, larger narrative).
Times have a-changed, and I honestly think that the major factor in this discussion is simply the mod's age. It's gotten old and people have moved on, devs included. At this point, I'm hoping that Battlegrounds is as fun as cRPG was. I'm hoping that, after my IRL fun-times are over with, I can buy Battlegrounds and immerse myself once again into a the derpy, imaginative, medieval playground that I'd romped in not so long ago. Hopefully the devs are able to keep the freedom and sandbox-y playfulness of the mod intact for the next version of things, while upgrading graphics and the strat mechanics to make a more intuitive, fun experience.
Sorry for the rambling. I've been busy and have only recently had access to beer. Beers.