Now, I'm going to explain this slowly one more time and hopefully Uriel can take his dead out of his [censored] for two seconds and actually listen,.. errr, I mean read.

I'm lvl 81, I've never had an NPC die from a dragon attack before, yet I have 3 ghost towns in only a couple of days as a result of this DLC. Why you ask? I will explain a few points.. .Slowly...

Dragons are large, very visible targets. They can be seen via compass from great distances away. Their attacks are slow and very predictable. They will attack the last thing that has attacked them, meaning more often than not, guards with bows. Music begins playing the moment they arrive and they are quite vocal about it. When a dragon attacks, it is all against one. The dragon will switch targets often, and provide long pauses between attacks while it flies about allowing NPC's time to recover.

Vampires are small, and fast and can not be seen from great distances via the compass. Their attacks are fast and powerful with intermittent summoning. They will choose targets at random, more often than not the nearest living thing. Vampires can spawn on the opposite side of a hold without any indication they are there. At higher difficulty levels they can kill non guard NPC's in a single strike, at roughly 1-2 strikes per second. These attacks can happen and be quelled all without the PC's knowledge of said attack on the other end of the city. When a Vampire attacks it is not all V.S. one. It is often 3-5 well armed targets accompanied by Death hounds and magic V.S. a number of NPC's in clothing wielding iron daggers in the midst of guards.

The problem people such as myself are having, is not the Vampire V.S. PC. It's the fact that they can spawn on the other side of the hold undetected and wreak havoc on the NPC population before you have a chance to react. One such example. I searched Riverwood for vampires. I spent a good minute looking around and found none. I then entered the tavern, did my bussiness, and when I left, I was greeted with a death hound killing Meeko (A dog follower) while the screen was still un-fading from black. He was dead before I even raised my hands to cast magic.

These attacks can not be stopped, and will happen for so long as you play Skyrim. These attacks can actually break your game removing quests, merchants, and other NPC's. This isn't a matter of skill, or "Killing them before they kill the NPC's" These attacks make the game tedious and paranoia producing. As I said before, I searched top to bottom when entering Riverwood and found no vampires. Yet they still spawned in the town after I had looked specifically for them.

Dragons are vocal, you know whether or not there is a dragon the moment they appear. Even without music, you still hear the tell tale shouting of the dragon in the background. Vampire can make no such noises, and can attack the NPC's quietly. Sometimes right under your nose. I was speaking with Adrianne at the forge of Whiterun, all the while Heimsker was getting his throat removed by a couple of lovey vampires.

After doing all of my townlike bussiness, crafting selling, etc. I wandered up to Dragon's reach to boost my enchanting only to find half the town dead surrounding the Gildergreen... Reload and redo 15 minutes of selling, crafting, reorganizing etc. That is not fun, a game mechanic should not make the player paranoid and make the game itself tedious and stressful. Unless of course that is the point of the game, that is not the point of Skyrim.

I enter a town, slow time, or wirlwind sprint around searching every nook and cranny of the town for vampires, then do my business. and before leaving again, I re-search the whole town for dead bodies just in case they spawned after I had searched for them the first time. (Such as they did in Riverwood) That is not fun in any way. Being paranoid over your towns, constantly having to check on everything. This isn't Dovahsitter. It's Skyrim, your supposed to be out killing dragons, not babysitting the townguard... And that is what has me up in arms. Dragons I can deal with, not genocidal assassins in the backgrounds of my town removing my quests and other game content. DLC's are supposed to expand on the base game, not remove it....


EDIT: Oh, and I'm not against the idea, I quite like it, it just needs to be tweaked a bit. As it stands, if they wipe out your town, that's it, the town is dead, it does not repawn, new people don't move in, yet more and more Vampires still keep coming no matter what you do. That needs to be changed.

Having the main town I live in Whiterun be dead, kind of makes the game no longer fun. Riverwood, Whiterun and Markarth are ghost towns because of this DLC. Right now my only work around is to not go to towns, or just keep searching/killing/reloading till I manage to save everything. Which could take hours. I spent at least a half hour stopping the solitude attack. They spawned near the Legion fort and started killing off the legion blacksmith/quest givers.

yeah i have seen you post on other pages and i know that you are against this ridiculous feature, when i saw the dawnguard trailer i thought vampire attacks would be cool. but i never once thought that they should happen in towns where people go to relax

Oh you don't have to tell that to me I'm one of the main posters here who is against Random events happening in the city

I will always stand by my opinion. Cities are SAFE HAVENS, not warzones. Though Uriel likes to mention how the DLC is an invasion, in all of Dawnguard's marketing, I did not see a single hint that the DLC was an invasion. Too me it was more of 2 added strongholds with new features who are waging war on one-another and the vampires were starting it. I also like to bring up that the Civil War in Skyrim doesn't have random events on cities. If it wasn't added back then, it sure as hell shouldn't have been added now!

Either way it goes a bunch of people are gonna be angry. If it changes then all these threads about it are just gonna go in reverse. For the gamers at this point there is no win-win. I, personally, dont mind the attacks, but at the same time would be just as content if they only happened outside of cities. I think I am in the true minority of the situation. I understand the sentiment of both sides and what I find to be interesting is what Bethesda will choose to do or not do about it. Either way if a decision is made, the fires will be burning in these forums.

i agree, uriel has been trying to defend this 'feature' on all posts complaining about it. he hasnt seen any sense and doesnt understand that this is a massive problem and will ruin the entire game. no matter how many ways he tries to defend the attacks his ideas are always flawed and dont fix this huge problem

A person mentioned before that a moderator said they'll pass these complaints on to the developers and see what they have to say about it ( not sure which mod, but someone said so). Anyway, if we do get a comment from them saying the feature is working fine as it is - good. I'll just mod it for myself on the PC, but those on consoles who don't like it will then come here and keep writing threads. These are mostly Xbox users here, PS3 still doesn't have it and PC users have no need to write complaints here when everything is moddable.


Uriel is an okay person who has his own opinion. He likes the feature and therefore it's okay if he's defending the feature. He did make some good points, but so did I. Discussions are always something of a crossroad. You get some, you lose some I'm not for removing vampire attacks, I think they should just be removed from the cities.

How about thinking of suggestions both camps can be happy with? I've heard some good ones like..

- Spawn them with extra guards
- Bring a mini game element into it that allows you to beef up villagers and defences against them for more survivability
- Have NPC's who are armed in little more than an apron, run away from them.
- Give us the option in game to turn off the attacks somehow

What else is there or what could be expanded upon?

NPCs running away would be good. Along with lower the amount of encounters. Another issue is the number of people that spawn. Two vampires and two death hounds is horrible. Taking them all down before any losses is impossible.

Running away would be great. My first encounter was a free-for-all in the riften market. I just had a dogpile of people there, I couldnt tell what everyone was attacking. There was dogs and two vampires. guards, beggers, flipping everyone. I couldnt get an attack through.

Fixing the problem is good, removing is taking away the creator's vision.

Everything that you suggested is fine as any other suggestion and would be a nice upgrade. But that costs money to the developers. If I was a developer, I would simply instead of adding them to cities , add a special event where vampires vs hold guards would be having a fight on the roads and guards would be all like "Vampire attacks are growing stronger each day... yada yada".

Two things would resolve this issue imo.

1. NPC AI should have a sense of self preservation, something that's been missing since the game launched... remember that live action trailer for Skyrim where a dragon attacks and everybody (even a guard!) runs? Yeah... in the game they'd actually be running towards the threat with iron daggers drawn, for glory and death! Essentials can be as gung ho as they like (I welcome the help) but non essentials ought to be more inclined to run.

2. Upon completing the main quest of Dawnguard vamp attacks in towns should cease, yes... cease. (You can't kite vamps out of town zones like you can dragons either btw, so vamps attacks are much more pressure on the player than dragons).
I'm all for having vamps still active in the wilderness after the mq is finished, just not in towns.

These two changes would dramatically reduce npc deaths during the DG storyline and once that story is complete, the "invasion" is over but players who enjoy fighting vamps can still get their fun out in the wilds.

Compromise ftw?

Two things would resolve this issue imo.

1. NPC AI should have a sense of self preservation, something that's been missing since the game launched... remember that live action trailer for Skyrim where a dragon attacks and everybody (even a guard!) runs? Yeah... in the game they'd actually be running towards the threat with iron daggers drawn, for glory and death! Essentials can be as gung ho as they like (I welcome the help) but non essentials ought to be more inclined to run.

2. Upon completing the main quest of Dawnguard vamp attacks in towns should cease, yes... cease. (You can't kite vamps out of town zones like you can dragons either btw, so vamps attacks are much more pressure on the player than dragons).
I'm all for having vamps still active in the wilderness after the mq is finished, just not in towns.

These two changes would dramatically reduce npc deaths during the DG storyline and once that story is complete, the "invasion" is over but players who enjoy fighting vamps can still get their fun out in the wilds.

Compromise ftw?

I will always stand by my opinion in this. Cities are SAFE HAVENS, not warzones. Though Uriel likes to mention how the DLC is an invasion, in all of Dawnguard's marketing, I did not see a single hint that the DLC was an invasion. Too me it was more of 2 added strongholds with new features who are waging war on one-another and the vampires were starting it. I also like to bring up that the Civil War in Skyrim doesn't have random events on cities. If it wasn't added back then, it sure as hell shouldn't have been added now!

No invasion I've ever heard of has involved infinite suicide squads sneaking into cities and conducting suicide attacks forever. Invasions tend to mean...an invasion. Someone invades - they win or they lose but then they've invaded and that's that invasion done. This sounds more like an endless supply of undead Al Qaeda that don't even know to stop when they've already killed everybody. A vampire invasion would be much more sensible if they stayed out of cities and ambushed people on the roads. That has a chance of success. It's not remotely realistic that all these vampires are suicidal but are safe in the knowledge they exist in infinite quantities. It's just idiotic to try to argue it makes the notion of a vampire invasion more realistic. They'd only attack in this fashion if they had a full scale army and weren't committing suicide each time - and as other people have pointed out, if this was happening cities would be sealed and people entering rigorously checked. When you're being invaded you don't leave your gates wide open for all comers. Hell's bells it makes the core game look totally stupid

Whiterun -

City is closed with the dragons about

I bring news from Helgen

Oh ok we'll make an exception - up til now we've only been letting vampires in

Riften -

If you want to enter the city you have to pay the tax first....unless you're a homicidal vampire mass murderer here to kill us all...who we're incapable of noiticing


Markarth -

Welcome to Markarth traveller, safest city in the reach. Except for all the vampire killers we've been letting in so they can slaughter everybody...on seconds thoughts maybe you'd be better off going to hang out with the forsworn...

, but are too racist to allow khajiit traders into town

I wonder what the likelihood of one of the team coming on here to help solve the issues and sort out a work around are?

0. In all my (four ) years here i've never seen that happen.

0. In all my (four ) years here i've never seen that happen.

exactly, the people which think this is an invasion dlc are insane, its dawnguard vs vampires. the attacks are worse than an invasion too, they are an endless horde which attack is different ways from silent to full out attacks. they should stick to the roads. its ridiculous that the city knows that there are vampires attacking but they let new shady npc's into town which murder people, but are too racist to allow khajiit traders into town