What matters to me here is not the actual WotLK greens themselves. It’s the notion of being selfish and disregarding others while doing group content. That’s the principle that makes RDF a sometimes unbearable experience in current Cata content, where things may or may not start to matter more. That’s why I don’t think you should encourage or accept this behaviour in any part of the game.
But I can’t and won’t stop you from going on with your practices. It should however come as no surprise to you that people you meet will not always just comply with your ways. And I honestly don’t see the issue you have with people reacting to your actions by initiating votekicks. If you don’t want to risk getting votekicked, just play the game with the same common sense that most players in this game already do. It’s really not more complicated than that.
That aside, your story doesn’t really add up here I feel. If you indeed do ask people to speak up if they want something you claimed as yours, why are you not paying attention to your chatlog until it was too late? The tank speeding ahead doesn’t stop you as a dps class to glance at your chat once or twice between pulls.
Just because you roll need on item in belief that nobody cares, it does not necessarily means you immediately claim the item as yours, as long as it’s still tradeable.
Problem is that it was no longer visible in the chat window in between pulls.
It got pushed away with experience gained system messages during combat.
That’s why I didn’t noticed. The mage however never /trade me for the item.
Initiating vote kick is apparently easier than /trade to get someone’s attention since they didn’t noticed the chat.
That mage most likely didn’t though about the fact that I simply didn’t noticed the /w in the middle of combat, and was convinced that I ignored him on purpose.
That was not the case though, I didn’t put him on ignore list.
I usually play by the rules, and help others if I can, still encounter lot of toxic players who are way more selfish than rolling on now level green items.
I’ve decided that being nice does not pays off all the time, and play bit selfish on my own for change, to get some mats for enchanting, and this is what I get. Being treated as same if not worse offender as those who always choose the vote kick as solution to everything. Serves me well.
Since then I’ve set /w to open in separate tab which flashes when new /w was sent and more importantly I also decided to no longer roll need on green items even though rest of the group does not care about them, not because of the rule that you may roll need only on low level green item that you are about to equip, but because you are apparently not able to trade items with players from different realms in the first place.
I assume the only exception are items from heroic dungeons that have this specifically notified in tooltip as being tradable with players eligible for the loot in that specific group.
Never rolled need on any item from heroics that was not for my class and spec, thus never had to give it to another player. For that reason I have no idea if those actually are tradable cross-realm.