Something is breaking down with the random World Encounters and their spawn points in Skyrim. One sign of this is the absence of encounters at locations I know spawn World Encounters. Not just because they're marked on a map in the strategy guide, but because I have had a random World Encounter spawn there every single time I travel past that specific point... until one day they suddenly stop producing events. And then, from that point forward, I never see a random World Encounter spawning at that point ever again. Currently there are several locations like this that have gone cold in my game (close to a dozen).

I think this may be linked to a related problem I'm having with a specific World Encounter: the Revelers. I've run across the three Revelers randomly in my travels a few times, but I never completed their mini-quest because I never had the required item on me. I wasn't even aware of the quest involving a specific brand of mead (and the useful reward they give the player in exchange) until a friend brought it to my attention.

Normally this wouldn't be a problem, as I usually run into the Revelers partying at random locations to the side of the road as I travel across Skyrim. Unfortunately, for the past real-life two weeks the three Revelers have been standing around on the property of Pelgaia Farm across the road from Whiterun. They stand there day and night just idling, not displaying their party animations, and not responding with anything more than a generic greeting when approached. And since then I have never encountered them randomly on the road anywhere else anymore. It has been over two weeks of real time now and they're still just there after 100+ hours of play. And because of this I can't do their little mead-exchange quest.

Now, I think this is related to the problem with World Encounter points drying up because the last time I ran into these Revelers they were at the World Encounter spawn point near the road just east of Redoran's Retreat. That's just down the road from Pelgaia Farm, which is where they apparently ended up after packing up their party (once they give the player a drink they stop their party and start journeying down the nearest road). This specific World Encounter spawn point stopped producing random events from that point forward. I suspect it's because the three Revelers are still "active" and currently linked to that spawn point, preventing it from spawning anything else.

Here is a link of a screenshot I took today of the Reveler's, where they have been standing around Pelgaia Farm for two real-world weeks (and 100+ hours of game time) now. As an amusing side-bug, when I went to take this picture a dragon spawned near Whiterun and is just circling over my position (that's what all the Revelers are staring off at in the picture). The dragon refused to land or attack anyone, despite having plenty of targets. This not-so-rare bug was supposedly fixed in the recent patch, but obviously isn't.

Image: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7171/6439263611_6a841d9c21_b.jpg

Please fix this problem. I'm slowly running out of working World Encounter spawn points.

Is there a place to submit a bug report or ticket to Bethesda support, other than just posting a thread on the forums?

You could use http://www.gamesas.com/eng/contact_email.php for that ...

My very first world encounter broke (one of the participants was killed by a dragon before he had chance to talk to me).
I think this breakage has prevented me from getting any further encounters for pretty much the entire game.

I tried this but never received any sort of response from Bethesda (not even a generic "we got your ticket, give us x-days to investigate and respond" email). So that approach appears to be a bust.

Thanks for the suggestion, though.

The https://unofficialskyrimpatch.16bugs.com/projects/7078 team have a proper bug tracker where you can submit problems. Make sure to search first to see if somebody has already posted your specific issue. They have been submitting their results to Bethesda, so hopefully their stuff is getting read.

There's also somebody from QA browsing the forum at this very moment, but Bethesda employees almost never post anything, so its hard to tell what they do and don't read.