The last thread on this topic was locked for post count, but it's a serious issue that needs to be addressed with a patch.

Currently, as is, a squad of high level vampires randomly spawns when you travel to/enter cities and towns. These characters proceed to wreak havoc and slaughter the idiot merchants and misc quest givers of the town that rush them with iron daggers or less. Given enough (Not very much) time, this will leave the wide open world of Skyrim a lifeless ghost town, leaving many side quests broken.

The most simple solution to this problem is to make the attack a one time event, worst case is you lose one city worth of non respawning NPCs. Other fixes include making the spawns stop once the quest line is done (Can we get this for dragons too?), or making the townspeople smarter and guards stronger.

I support ending them after the mq, keeping the encounters to the wild. It's annoying to have to use slow time everytime I enter a city to protect the citizens.

They should just have new npcs that move into the old noes places etc. that way if you happen to kill them they won't be gone for awhile.

Or have the vampires only attack guards. Guards respawn right?

I don't seem to have a huge problem with this. I don't use fast travel as much, which I think affects the occurrence of random events like Dragons appearing and Vampire attacks. Rarely do the vampires attack citizens, often they spawn near me and go straight for me. If you are wearing Dawnguard armor they attack you and yell scripted stuff. Generally the clutter of guards and NPCs causes the vampires to die extremely fast. I don't seem to be having these 'ghost towns' people keep talking about.

I've avoided towns altogether. If it stays this bad, I might just uninstall it entirely.

Weird I've only fast traveled to two big towns(windhelm and solitude) and have had no vamp attacks is it only small towns?

I've had attacks on just about every settlement across 70 hours of Beta gameplay. It's not as frequent as the attack I get on the road. I believe that fast traveling increases the chance of the attacks to occur.

As is the case with Dragon attacks.

It's all on a random queue. And it's really mot as bad as people make it out to be. Usually the City Guard slaughters them before they can do much of anything.

Yeah that's how I feel. Really not that bad.

Looks like i won't be fast traveling anymore when i get dawnguard.

How the hell did Beta testers not make inquiries about this?

FFS.

We did. Bethesda decided to keep it.

Im sure they did, but that doesnt mean dev team did anything. Def not beta testers fault.

I've seen asinine decisions before but damn.

Oh well. Dawnguard went from a day 1 purchase to not gonna touch with a 10 foot pole. Skyrim is a fun game as is. I don't want a dlc that over time makes this great game world broken or lifeless. Reading posts from the previous thread scared me away from dawnguard. Posts like this "they killed every killable NPC in riften and markarth."

Imagine after you beat dawnguard and continue ur character. After awhile the big cities to small towns will be wiped out. If you start a new character for dawnguard at level 10, who knows how many broken mini quests you will have by level 20. Dawnguard is not worth the aggravation for me. I'm happy a thread was made to point this issue out.

I wish I knew this before I bought it.

Wow, Bethesda. You guys clearly didn't think this one through at all. I mean, did you even try to think of the repercussions? I can't imagine how new characters made with Dawnguard already downloaded will progress without their world becoming lifeless.

This is an overstatement. The attacks on the cities are no more different than the attacks by dragons, and no more devastating. The vampire attacks are only different in that they have a slightly higher chance to occur. They only trigger upon opening the city's "cell", and the guards and other NPCs (along with you if you are paying attention) make short work of the invaders. It is not something that should prove any more dangerous than a normal dragon attack. The Vampires also don't continue to attack NPCs that have taken the kneeling animation when other opponents are present, so the only reason that one would die is because either the player was careless or left the cell while it was under attack. This is very similar to how people were complaining about NPCs dying from dragon attacks at launch.

I just reloaded my save, and then it didn't happen again, but sometime later I got 3 deaths in riften.

Better then the whole town xD

No, this is far worse then the random dragon attacks, no one in my mates game has ever died from a dragon attack, pre or post main quest, he made sure of that, plus their easy to stop once you have dragonrend. But this, this is a whole new level of madness. You would walk into a city having walked for 20 minutes to get there because your afraid of fast traveling, and find it under attack with people dead.

People not having a problem must be using low level characters or playing on an easier level. We used a level 81 character on Master and even with all the powerful spells and weapons at our disposal, unlimited destruction spell usage and the ability to summon 2 dremora lords, who on master are overpowered, we could not stop the slaugter. You have no idea what its like to see your character who you thought was so godlike amd capable of all thing made to look useless.

I don't like this at all. It's one reason that two of my characters haven't spawned dragons. I want to go to town and go about my business, instead of having to save NPCs.

Does fast traveling to a location outside the city, then walking in on foot alleviate this issue at all?

I'd imagine it's worse.

Dragon encounter = one singular dragon being focused down by the ENTIRE town, with the dragon attacking fairly slow (takes long pauses between attacks) and only focusing on one person at a time. Posts make it sound like for the vampire encounters though, we're talking ~3 vampires who attack as rapidly as humans.

More importantly (to me anyways), it's just tedious. Even if you don't care about NPCs dying, it's something that becomes old and tedious with time, even moreso if you try desperately to protect your townspeople.

They should make Eah city have a radiant quest to raid a vampire lair in each hold. Once you kill all the vampires in the lair the attacks on that hold's city stop. Thy way if you don't like re feature u can do all the quests so they stop. But if u like the feature u can ignore the quests completely. Or only do some and leave others.

Oh so that's what happened to my thread... I wondered where that wandered off to.

So, I fast traveled to Riverwood to pick up Meeko... Everyone died. Not. Funny.