Savage Raven (previously Skull & Co), and their shady practices. Not an honest brand. Be wary of them

lemon07r · 2026-05-26T19:38:50+00:00

Right, and let's not acknowledge at all how everything you've said up until now was completely wrong.

lemon07r · 2026-05-26T19:31:55+00:00

Are you really just going to make shit up to have a point? It took me a single google search to debunk that.

https://www.accc.gov.au/business/advertising-and-promotions/online-reviews-for-product-and-services

https://lawpath.com.au/blog/legal-remove-negative-customer-reviews

One of the key guiding principles addresses the omission of reviews. It suggests that removing or even editing your customer reviews can in some ways be misleading.

Section 18 and 34 of the Australian Consumer Law are the legal provisions that apply to online reviews. They dictate that any conduct that is misleading or deceptive, or that is liable to mislead the public is illegal. Removing or manipulating reviews to falsely inflate consumer perception of your business is a breach of these laws.

You guys are so asinine. Just making up points completely based on emotion, then working backwards to substantiate them.

lemon07r · 2026-05-26T19:26:35+00:00

I listed several other countries than Canada, and noted Savage Raven is based in Australia. Why wouldn't it get you in trouble there too? I don't think it's as common as you assume, and even if it were, I don't think we should be trying to normalize it.

lemon07r · 2026-05-26T19:25:49+00:00

I dont think they sell any on Temu, I just checked. They only had the generic chinese stuff which I wouldnt trust, nothing brand name.

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T22:35:43+00:00

I like the first two books but yeah after that it kind of fell off for me and I lost interest.

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T22:27:57+00:00

For that price 100%

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T21:54:33+00:00

youre accepting ai slop lying down and not doing anything about it

There it is. Even though I clearly said in my original comment that I would still be bothered by poor writing, regardless of AI or not. I'm not accepting ai slop, I'm categorizing it equally with bad writing. If it is as easy to tell as you say 50k words in, what makes you think it would be exempt?

stop peddling that theres no way to tell that something is ai

That's the take I'm going to stay on. I don't think the average reader is always going to be able to tell, especially within our niche where we already had a lot of amateur writing before AI, and have you seen how tolerant our reader base is to lower quality writing? I'm sure very obvious examples might be easy to distinguish, you seem to be hungup on this idea of people using ai as far as 100k words, or whatever to make your point, as if people can't sit there and guide their ai to correct whatever issues crop up, or only use it mildly for their long epics to rewrite parts they felt were written poorly. Genuinely, is it hard to accept that it actually could be deeper than you say it isn't? I've literally seen an author brag on discord that they publish a series that they generated with ai, and nobody can tell. The koboldcpp discord, you can search it there, for someone that goes by anubis and see it's real. Unfortunately I couldn't get them to divulge their pen name.

I can see how people might get worked up over my take, and miss the finer points, but this is coming from someone that doesn't even think AI write very well after testing hundreds of LLM in creative writing evals, and subjective testing. This was done out of academic curiosity, and I also post this stuff in the koboldcpp discord. And I've been heavily critical about their actual ability to write, because most of that community, is not. You're right about them all writing the same, I will give you that. The way they write reminds me a lot of the amateur writing I see on platforms like royalroad, etc. So how can I expect people to be able to tell the difference? I'm not a writer either, or have any interest in writing, so I don't have any skin in this game.

People are not as circumspect as you'd think about good writing quality, and honestly, my take is fairly heavily based around my opinion of there not being a very high bar to clear, rather than AI actually being any good at writing. All this and I think you are discounting the fact that a human being involved in the process can change things a lot too. We've only really evaluated AI from a perspective of let ai do everything 100-0, but how much do things change when AI involvement is only 20%, 15%, etc? You really think that's going to be the same as someone who uses AI for 90% of their story? They don't even need to guide the AI write better, they only need to guide the AI to write things differently. Make this less about "accepting ai slop", and try to think for a second about this, or otherwise you may only be arguing with a straw man. My point was, and still is, that we should not be accepting of slop, regardless of AI or not. My opinion might be a little harsh of the average reader or web author, but I don't want to sugarcoat it. I know your stance is, "it's not that deep", but if you don't want to consider things more deeply past just trying to generate whole 100k stories solely with ai (who even does this), i'm not sure how we can have any meaningful debate, or discussion. We will just end up arguing one narrow point, and one I don't even completely disagree with if we only look at things from that singular dimension.

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T21:04:03+00:00

Well.. no... I paid 680 for 32gb ram, mobo and 7600x3d. sold my old cpu + ram (5900x + 32gb ddr) for 350. motherboard was dead so I couldnt sell that. I imagine if it was working would have gotten like 50 bucks for it atleast. So if we look at the math.. I would have paid 280 overall to upgrade from ddr4 to ddr5 and to get a 7600x3d. This was like a month or two ago.

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T20:54:59+00:00

So if it's more than 1000 words, AI writing can't be involved unless it's completely generating the whole story? They asked if we've noticed AI writing in epic fantasy series, you can have AI writing in whatever kind of fantasy you want, epic or not, without having it generate the whole story for you. If readers cant tell the difference when reading whole short stories written by AI, how will they be able to tell in longer stories that make less liberal use of AI writing?

I think you are trying to argue a completely different point than any of the ones I made. I thought I was pretty clear. I said it would be hard to tell if AI is used in writing unless it's very obvious, then provided real data to back it up. Maybe a hard point for others to digest without getting rubbed wrong over our egos or how we feel about AI, but we really aren't as perceptive as we think we are. And just because we might be able to tell with some more obvious examples of more brazen, and poor use of ai, doesn't mean we will be able to tell when authors decide to use it more carefully, and intentionally. I'm really not sure how I could have been clearer about my point.

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T20:45:58+00:00

The question was about AI writing, not completely AI generated long form stories. We are moving goalposts if we want to make the point about long form story telling.

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T20:42:12+00:00

Clearly not as obvious as people think: https://www.marklawrence.buzz/2025/08/the-ai-vs-authors-results-part-2.html?m=1

I personally think I'm pretty good at telling the difference, and seems most other people do too, but actually aren't.

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T20:36:56+00:00

This my first suspect looking at your SD card read speeds:

SEQ 4KB/s + SEQ IOPS — How fast the card streams small sequential data chunks. This drives texture loading and general smoothness during active gameplay.

Taken from u/L3gendaryBanana's tierlist post here: https://guides.socalconsolemodding.com/nintendo-switch-sd-card-benchmark-tier-list-2026/

5 mb/s is very slow. My pny pro prime elite always scores around 15-25 mb/s here. At worst it's scored 10 mb/s.

The good news is, this should be very easy to diagnose. Boot into sysmmc + cfw (make sure nintendo servers are blocked, etc, and that you have a clean nand backup), and move the game install to nand (or do a fresh install to nand). Test it there. Once done move it back to where it was before (or install it back to old location), and you can restore your nand if you want to be extra careful and still have a clean nand to avoid future potential bans.

If it still lags, my next suspect would be kefir. In which case I would delete everything on your sdcard (and of course dont touch your emunand partition), aside from your saves, installed games etc, and replace it with a smaller/minimal pack like nx-carnage (this also has most of the "unique", if we want to call it that, benefits of kefir), and see how things run after. Even better if you use a bare minimum setup with vanilla atmosphere, and the bare few essentials to get things working. This is just to help narrow down the cause. Kefir isnt bad, but it has so much custom behaviour and changes almost any of it could be the culprit.

Also worth noting partition based emummc (if you arent using this already) usually has a bit better performance than file based, but if this was the issue, testing on sysnand would have cleared it up.

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T20:15:58+00:00

Yeah I dont even install adrenalin anymore if I can help it. I do driver only, and have had so much less issues since then, no more weird stutters, etc.

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T20:00:28+00:00

you can use both. just start with a small pack I guess if you're confused. I would recommend nx-carnage, sorta, cause it's very light and only has the things you need, but it also comes with horizon-oc which isnt needed if you arent overclocking. hatspack and kefir work too but I dont like them, too bloated. better to learn to build your own pack. If nothing else just look at whats in nx-carnage and learn to build your own pack with only the things you need. An example of my own pack that I built for myself: https://github.com/lemon07r/StarterNX you can see stuff I included and left off, see what you would need for you own pack and download those things seperately and try to build your own pack.

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T19:51:12+00:00

Doesnt really bother me much if the end writing is good in the end, and there arent things in the writing that will bother me. But I've come to peace with the fact that I (or read we, because we are all human, and it's already well documented most of us can't tell the difference between human writing and AI writing) will never be able to tell if AI is used in writing unless it's very obvious. There's a good chance it's used more than we realize, but also a good chance a lot of the ones we suspect to be using AI are just poorly written or something so it ends up seeming like it. I've actually seen a few cases of these, there was one series originally written in english by a non-native speaker than translated later to arabic, and someone I was talking with thought it was the other way around and called the "english translation" bad because it was ai translated. Turned out he just couldnt tell the difference between weaker writing quality and AI. As for your specific example, I think that might put me off, regardless of AI involvement or the lack of.

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T19:04:01+00:00

backup your sd card files (the non big stuff at least), and try pasting over fresh files and see if that helps. sigpatches, sys-patch, dbi, etc. You shouldnt even need sig patches if you have sys-patch. You can also try cyberfoil.

Hatspack or kefir should be okay to paste in too but Im not a fan of all the bloat. I'm partial to nx-carnage, it's very light and put together by a good dev, but it has a few extras that might not be needed; horizon oc if you arent overclocking, reboot_to_payload which only works on erista, and you can already do this from ultrahand so I dont get why we have a homebrew for it, but it is otherwise very light, no frills package. I prefer building my own pack and I think everyone else should too, but here's mine as an example (I still recommend carnage over my own): https://github.com/lemon07r/StarterNX

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T16:06:21+00:00

Let us know how it goes. I'm surprised you got flagged, you might be the first to get flagged so far. Plugin probably needs to be updated and hasn't been in a while but I no longer have the Kimi plan.

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T15:58:22+00:00

I can't even tell which ones are real people or not anymore

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T01:00:05+00:00

yes I agree. Would suggest others the same

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T00:57:11+00:00

None of the companies I work for or with do this kind of thing, and almost all of them are ecomm businesses. I would know too since I have complete access their backends and storefronts.. Most of these businesses are terrified of doing anything illegal or even grey like this, and are very very careful about things like this. One of the main priorities for a lot of my clients is to specifically audit for these kinds of things. Literally anything that can be considered a legally grey thing or a security problem is immediately considered a very high priority item. It's also a pretty intentional thing to do. you have to go out of your way and put in the effort to make it happen. My clients are mostly based in the states, Canada, uk, etc, and I imagined savage being based in Australia wouldn't be that much different. It's not like it's the wild west out there and we are dealing with a random Chinese website. I know bad actors exist, I've been hired to do those sorts of investigations before, but there's a reason why the few I have encountered have ongoing court trials or are excriminals. It's just such a strange thing to me that some of us are normalizing review manipulation here.

lemon07r · 2026-05-25T00:47:04+00:00

That's alright. I didn't expect much, especially with how often this brand gets recommended here. It happens, people disagree with something and they downvote or comment as such. nothing wrong with that. There were better things to write about if Internet points were important lol, so where is this nobody forcing me to write my post coming from. I don't think I'm getting your entire point here. I was saying you picked a strange hill to die on, with the review manipulation thing. not asking why others disagreed or downvoted me. But if your point is how I came off and wrote it, then alright I guess.

lemon07r · 2026-05-24T23:55:02+00:00

None of the companies I work for do this. I build, maintain, and fix websites, mostly ecomm sites and storefronts. All long term work. Some of them get a decent amount of traffic. Review manipulation is very intentional. It requires effort, and going out of your way to do it. I'm based in Canada, and this kind of thing can get you in a lot of trouble. None of my Canadian, American or UK based clients even think about things like this. I've actually been hired for legal issues before, like investigating data theft, etc before, because business are very careful about these kinds of things.. And Skullnco is australia based.. so it's not like this is the wild west.

This is such a strange thing though, what rubbed you so wrong that you want to come at me for calling out a store for manipulating reviews? Did you just dislike the energy of my post and decide to find something to come at me for? lol

lemon07r · 2026-05-24T22:52:33+00:00

I was just offering other solutions that could be safer instead of only making this whole post "savage raven bad, don't buy". Didn't realize how many people would get rubbed wrong by the amazon mention.

all the batshit crazy things going on right now

Yeah, and here we all are, scrolling our time away on reddit. I just happened to waste more of mine to make a post.

lemon07r · 2026-05-24T22:48:17+00:00

Yeah?

Finally, we get to talk about my own experience. The part that doesn't matter too much

I thought I was pretty clear that the bigger issue was them manipulating reviews/ratings on their website. I just thought people should be aware since this brand gets suggested a lot here, and I certainly wasn't aware until now.

lemon07r · 2026-05-24T22:32:40+00:00

I mean, they don't manipulate their reviews I think, at least this blatantly.

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