Being a vampire is pretty great but there's one thing that I find is totally illogical about it. After not feeding for so long, when you walk into a town everyone knows you're a vampire and tries to kill you regardless of whether or not they have any actual knowledge of you being one. I would think that no one would know I'm a vampire if I kept myself covered up and didn't tell anyone about it. Anyone else feel like the game logic is extremely flawed in that fact? Vampires are all about deception and subterfuge, it shouldn't be obvious to everyone that I am a vampire if i'm not lighting up in the sun whenever I walk around town. What do you guys think? Should the vampire work this way? Do we want it changed?

Maybe you sparkle?

Maybe there's some kind of aura that vampires exude when they are particularly hungry that gives them away, exuding an aura of dread and fear that is easily recognized by someone familiar with vampires? If this is how it works, why not make sure you are well fed before entering a town? Haven't played the game yet, but presumably you could go munch on some brigands or something...

I expected the Volkihar to be feral in appearance, and so unable to walk about as freely as others. I also expected you to be able to conceal your true nature with head gear.

The system itself is a copy & paste of the rubbish system from Oblivion, which was a lazy system that had little thought put into it anyway.

Vampires become more and more undead in appearance the longer they go without feeding.

That translates to you being more easy to be seen for what you truly are.

The vampire's features degenerate as he becomes more blood-starved, to the point that it becomes plainly obvious that someone's thirsty.

That's how it was in Oblivion, except I never had the guards attacking me, and I was able to just make a charm spell at max for two seconds to overcome their refusal to have dialogue.

It makes fast traveling a bit more risky if you don't pay attention to when your last feeding was.

The real question is:

What if the people were hungry?

It was said somewhere a long time ago from a Bethesda developer that Lycanthropy and Vampirism were treated like 'diseases from a design point of view.' That they didn't want to 'focus on them too heavily as that might pull away from the core elements that make up the main challenges of the game.'

Sadly I can't remember where i read that but I do remember it was on a discussion about comparisons of Daggerfall to Morrowind in the days before Morrowind came out.

My point: You have to look forward to mods for Vamps and were-beasts because Bethesda never does them well on purpose. They were close to enjoyable in Morrowind because at least then you had different Vampire clans that were warring and even quests. I always mod vampirism for their games so you can bet I'll be making a cool one.

maybe they smell funny

The things you guys have mentioned are true and I acknowledge these. I don't remember guards attacking you in oblivion, you just burned up in the sun. Even though your appearance is supposed to change, I've noticed nothing between stages of starvation compared to thirst quenched. Even so you should be able to disguise yourself with face masks and helmets. Vampires don't exude an aura of any sort in this game but even so, I've noticed that werewolves have a different tone of voice compared to regular humans and therefor should also be attacked when they're in town. I don't feel that bethesda has been a good granny when working with werewolves and vampires in this installment. If werewolves can walk around town freely, I should be able to at least disguise myself to prevent from being caught and attacked by the entire town if I really want to min/max my character by taking the weakness to fire and sunlight.

To me that sounds like them justifying putting unfinished content into a game to themselves. If they weren't going to do it right they shouldn't have done it at all. They were right in treating them like diseases, but the outcome doesn't make any logical sense. I don't see how lycanthropy or vampirism could detract from the main challenges of the game. I see them as character customization. They're something you can do to make your character more powerful in certain aspects. The way they're implemented in skyrim detracts from the main game because they weren't done right in the first place. I haven't had the chance to explore lycanthropy so I can't speak for it but what I've seen with vampirism has biased me against it so already.

You mean like the "Occupy" guys?