Think of it how ever you want its still annoying and no its not realistic what would be realistic is for new people to come into town and for business owners to bring in more workers.

It was sarcasm........

Do NOT enter Whiterun at night! Belethor wanders the city at night, so you may lose your general merchant. He is only in his shop between 8 AM and 8 PM. After that, he comes out to wander around. War-Bear also comes out of his shop at 8 PM to go to the tavern. Adrianne is a goner no matter what, probably, but she does go into her shop around 5 PM to have dinner and stays there until 8PM. After that, she comes back outside and starts wandering around. For the sake of merchants, the best time to enter the city would probably be around 6 or 7 PM.

Riften is a different story, very few wanderers. Most of them either head home or to the tavern at 8 PM. But then they come back out of the Tavern around 12 AM to go home. So one solution may be to enter around 3 AM when there are few civilians around. Come in at Mistveil Keep since the vamps seem to spawn in the market place.

As for myself, I have just formed the Whiterun Defense league. I made a bunch of Legendary Dragonbone Daggers, since they are bascially free, enchanted them with fire and shock damage, and pickpocketed them into a bunch of the daytime wanderers. I even gave one to Nazeem, even though I don't care if he lives, just so I would have one additional NPC dealing out damage before someone important goes. (Got caught 3 time pickpocketing. Seems to me there should be a "Gift" option added to every NPC's dialogue!)

Dude, welcome to my world

Pretty much doing the same thing; playing something else till this is dealt with, however long that will take now. & it sux because I was really getting into D.G till this started ruining the whole game for me

The WDL (Whiterun Defense League) has proven its worth. I just got hit by another vamp attack at the main gate of Whiterun (entered at 8 AM after waiting outside). One master vamp and two thralls showed up. I really couldn't get involved since the NPC just swarmed them. The best I could do was summon a Frost Atronach. Those vamps went down fast. Nazeem, Armen, Adrianne, the begger, and some guards all got involved and those daggers I gave them really helped out.

Now I need to create a sanitation crew for Whiterun, the ashpiles are really starting to accumulate in a big way. Pretty soon the place is going to look like Pompei.

Question: I have dropped armor before and had NPCs ask if they could take it, but they never do, they seem to just let it lie there. Also, when I get a new follower I give them seriously buffed armor hoping they will use it even when they are not my follower. So, for instance, I gave Anneke and Derkeethus some nice glass armor. But when I came back to Darkwater Crossing and a dragon attacked, they didn't wear it, even though they did use the weapons I gave them. So my question is: how can I get non-follower NPCs to equip armor?

Setting it to novice will actually make the npc's easier to kill as well, so setting it to novice could be counter productive to getting them to survive.. I'm wondering if the reason I dont have trouble with this is because I'm on master, and my npc's have more health. Thats funny if thats the case. I've never had any1 cut down as fast as u seem to be claiming, so it might be possible.

If they just made it so vampires weren't hostile towards anyone but you (like the dawnguard attacks) then this wouldn't be a problem.

What they should do is have the vampires sneak into the town and feed on sleeping people, and give guards a chance to catch them sneaking into or out of a house and then become hostile when the vampire resists arrest.

The only thing I find annoying about the vampire attacks is that every time I enter a town, I have to linger outside in the main spawn points for the "travelers" for a minute or two. Other than that, I haven't really had too much trouble killing the vampires before they get to the townsfolk. Granted, I'm playing on normal and my character is level 31 right now. I've only lost two people, so it hasn't been an issue yet.

You pretty much just hae to figure out where they spawn an make a bee-line to that area to make sure you can spot them before they turn hostile. I have the locations in Riften and Markarth down because that's where I've been spending most of my time lately. Fortunately Riften is full of many BAMFs who often take the vampires out before I even get to them.

If they were going to add this feature they should've thought it through more. To me any many people, it's repetitive, annoying, distracts from the rest of the game, and crosses the line from challenging fun to annoying hinderance, killing your beloved npcs along the way.

Here's what should have been done:
1. Make it so that instead of repetitive and mindless vampire killing, you can help the guards FIGHT BACK by training and upgrading them. If you're a vampire hunter, doesn't this make sense? This will decrease the liklihood of attack, make attacks happen outside of the gates with vampires TRYING to get in, and increases guard's chances of killing them quickly should they break in. If this is an "invasion of vampires" they should have gone all the way and let people REALLY fight back.
2. Make defenseless npcs run instead of fight using the system that worked in Oblivion, where every character has a level of courage and aggression that determines whether they fight or run. This is absent in skyrim apperently.
3. Make it so that, instead of making characters essential, important npcs can only be killed by the player, sparing them from dragons and vampires. Fallout New Vegas worked fine with no essentials. Skyrim needs SOME system however, because of all the random attacks on citizens. OR they could have made generic npcs be replaced by new ones. It doesn't make sense that no one ever moves back into houses or works at inns or shops after the previous owner dies.

But none of this was done. Bethesda really didn't think this aspect through. The beta testers allegedly complained about this, thinking it was a bug, but bethesda left this in.

Again, it's in your opinion. Unless you have a straight line into Bethesda as to what they intended for this to be, then it's all in your opinion.

And a few Beta testers complained. By no means was it a majority, and 90% of the Beta testers enjoyed the feature.

Misrepresentation of opinion as fact is very unbecoming.

Yes, IMO the randomization math has a glitch in the coding. It has to because there's so much variation from person to person in their games. But the feature will be tweaked when the next patch arrives, and that randomization will be fixed I'd imagine. But over-all, IMO, I don't think the feature need more than a minor tweak.

Of course this is just my opinion. No need to be passive aggressive. And I wasn't implying that 90% of people complained because I wasn't there. I just know from many beta testers I spoke to that many did. I realize we'll never agree on this, as we've debated on several forums on this very issue. We just have different priorities and perspectives when it comes to our games. I have my opinion and you can have yours.

And what is this patch you speak of? Have they announced that they're patching this? And that the vampire encounters are among the fixes? I really hope so.

I really have no knowledge of any imminent patch. But IMPO, since the accounts of the Vampire attacks are so varied, I am simply assuming (based on nothing, mind you) that when the next patch arrives, they may just tweak the algorithm for the math that handles the random vampire attacks. The variation between games and the problems with the algorithm that have been reported IMO would necessitate a tweaking of the coding.

Keep in mind that any "tweaking" of a dlc costs developers tens of thousands of dollars (consoles are very strict about coding and need to make sure it's clean). Bethesds rarely patches dlcs, and normally only when it's things that are literally game breaking. Since this apperently isn't breaking everyone's game, I think they'll be reluctant to patch this, but we'll see/

Normally I'd agree with you. But since Dawnguard is integrated into vanilla Skyrim, I think it'll be easier than it would've been in the past.

But like you mentioned, we'll just have to wait and see.

Yeah. I'm not doubting that it's doable, but from what I know, consoles charge developers a flat rate. So the price likely wont be different because it's so integrated into vanilla. I hope you're correct though.

Agreed.

Sometimes I use the slow time shout. Or paralyze if you have it for the master vampire. And having a strong companion can help to.

The thing is not everyone has to do all of that. I for one can kill them normally whenever they attack. Which isn't often for me.The jumping through hoops as you put it is for the people that cant just kill them before they kill a NPC for whatever reason.

Same here I have not seen one wild werewolf.

All of these good solutions, but none of which work for a level 26 with not even Dragon Call to my name. The only thing that would possibly work for me would be to turn into a werewolf and use the fear howl, but A) I have the Brotherhood howl and everyone would be dead by the time I went to the underforge and changed and; then the same townspeople would attack me and I'd have to get bounty myself

Bleh from the sounds of it I should start hunting dragons again and craft a bunch of Absorb Life + Fire damage dragon daggers and reverse pickpocket them on everyone. I should probably also outfit some magicka resistant decent gear on every guard and major npc...

*scrubs head*
Damn this is gonna be an expensive endeavor.

Dragon Bone daggers are basically free. Use petty or lesser soul gems for the enchants so it won't be as expensive (buy a bunch of empty petty soul gems and go mudcrab hunting). I would not use the absorb health; while nice in theory, you don't get very many uses out of it before needing recharge. I went with fire and shock damage. Fire for obvious reasons, and shock in order to reduce the vamps magicka reserves quicker.

This worked out well from my experience. I got hit by a vamp attack in Whiterun after giving all the outdoors people enchanted dragon daggers. Those vamps went down fast without me even getting involved. (Actually, I couldn't get involved because the npc's swarmed the vamps so thickly I couldn't get a clear shot.)

Anyway, its kinda amusing seeing everyone in town waltzing around with dragonbone daggers.

Well unfortunately I realized that I'm on PC so nope chuck testa with the dragonbone daggers. So now instead I am diving into every draugr infested crypt I have on my map and rolling up a ton of ebony weapons.
After that Imma go and fight more dragons (A play with a mod that allows me to convert 10 dragon souls to a single perk) and make a crap ton of +health and + magicka resistance gear for all of them.

Dawnguard is great and the content it add's to the game is awsome but the vampire attacks is a disaster that destroyed the dlc. It's not something that Bethesda is going to fix though. Just like the thing with marrying Serana, thousands of players want to marry her, but a few hundred say they dont care and their glad you cant.
Bethesda listens to the few hundred because they agree with them.
Its the same thing here.
Thousands complain about the vampire attacks wiping out towns, while hundreds say its not a problem. Bethesda is going to listen to the few hundred because Bethesda likely does not want to go back and change it. So we're stuck with vampires turning Skyrim into a ghost province, with no real way to fight back. I wonder how this will be written in the history books or in bards songs? Oh wait! Theres no historians or bards left to write or sing about their own deaths!