Oh for crying out loud, this isn’t a court of law. Ugh
And yes, it does go both ways considering all we were working off of was specualtion and there was nothing absolutely concrete to use as proof one way or the other. Which, in either case neither of us was technically wrong
Now; however, since we do have the answer, yes you were very much wrong in speculating about it being Druid related.
You are correct that just because the data exists in the dat file and was datamined does not concretely say what something is necessarily. However, if you take into consideration the other general information, you can make some guesses.
At this point, you are simply arguing for the sake of arguing.
Actually it’s closer to philosophical or scientific than judicial. Realistically, in an actual court and outside legal ideals, it’s just as much the responsibility of the defendant to demonstrate their innocence as it is the job of the prosecution to prove their guilt. If a man was accused of kitten and he did nothing to defend himself, even if the only evidence was testimony from the alleged victim, he’d likely still be convicted. The same can’t be said for science. Both the burden of proof and the kitten bit, actually.
That’s what it looks like when I’m arguing for the sake of arguing. Regardless of semantics, it actually still doesn’t “go both ways.” When one asserts that their speculation is correct, it is very much their job to prove the claim. Because we have two pieces of information, and no evidence directly linking these two pieces of information, we need to resort to speculation and hypotheses to establish a connection. However, I am not speculating that the two pieces of information are not connected; it’s actually an objective observation. The two pieces are not directly connected. There was no evidence in the form of game data or from ArenaNet that Revenants would be getting a Ventari legend. When data on Ventari was found in the game files, people simply assumed Revenants and Ventari were linked, despite no actual direct connection. Like I already said and gave examples for, the Ventari data could just as easily been linked to something unrelated to revenants. After all, this expansion does take place in the Maguuma Jungle, the home of Ventari.
Let’s use an analog. The year is 1200, and humans don’t understand what disease is. People have ideas, but no concrete evidence. Some of the more popular ideas are that disease comes from imbalances in the body, or from tainted air. Someone comes along and makes a claim that disease is caused by invisible animals too tiny to touch, see, or detect in any way. These animals enter our bodies and start wreaking havoc, and that havoc manifests as disease. That person adamantly believes this to be the truth, but he has no evidence. It’s just an idea that makes sense to him, but everyone else says he’s crazy and he needs to put on a mask to stop breathing in bad air.
That man is more or less correct in his assertion, but his argument is flawed, incorrect, invalid, and any other adjective you want to use, precisely because his argument is logically inconsistent and doesn’t actually make falsifiable claims or give any evidence to support itself. An argument can’t stand only on its assertion, it needs substance to back it up. In other words, he was right, but for the wrong reasons. Just as you were.
If you want a more ridiculous example of the second paragraph, see Russell’s Teapot. Or in other words, how do we really know there isn’t an interplanetary celestial teapot in orbit around Mars?
And that marks the end of my interest in explaining basic philosophy and logic on the GW2 forums.
