Hi there,

I am currently stuck in the main questline of the Dawnguard DLC, which is especially troublesome, because I intended to finish this DLC completely as soon as possible to stop the vampire attacks on villages (which seem to be a really stupid addition to the game, but that is a different topic) and prevent that any NPCs fall victim to them. I do not want to rely on a mod in this case, because I do not use any mods besides the unofficial patches at all.

I freshly installed the latest version of Skyrim, without any mods except for the unofficial patches, as I already mentioned. My saves are newly created, after the installation of the latest version of Skyrim and the unofficial patches. Since I currently have "Kindred Judgement" as active quest in one of my savegames, I assume that this problem is related to my save and should be fixable. Disabling the unofficial patches did not fix anything, as expected. The latest UDGB introduced a fix to one of the reasons for a similar bug, but the actual problem seems to be the quest itself, since regular console commands, which usually work, do not have any effect (as I experienced and many other people described). They reduced the chance of having to cope with this bug by introducing this fix, but did not make it any easier to deal with it, once you encountered it. Does anyone have any ideas about possible solutions for this problem?

Thank you in advance and please excuse my bad English, since I am no native speaker.

To the best of my knowledge there is no solution to this bug besides reverting to a previous save. The Unofficial Dawnguard Patch only fixes the issue with this quest not starting that is caused by killing the death hounds as far as I know.

Actually, the only way that vampire attacks will occur in cities after completing the main Dawnguard quest is by

Multiple people have claimed that doing radiant quests is going to make vampire attacks reoccur, one of them even quoted an answer of Gstaff regarding this issue. While he did not provide any kind of evidence or proof for this in his thread, I do not see any reason for him to lie about this matter (I tried to provide the link to that thread, but the forum did not allow me to, so I am just going to post the quote).

"The vampire attacks are an intended feature, and they'll go away when you finish Dawnguard's main quest. However, doing any of the radiant quests for the Dawnguard or Volkihar has a chance of triggering further attacks."

I would prefer to not take this risk at all, because vampire attacks are terribly annoying on higher levels, once nobody but you can deal with them anymore. The feature seems to be badly implemented in that regard, since the aggressive AI of NPCs in combination with randomly spawning hostile creatures, which are on your level, is predetermined to cause some kind of problems. The same NPCs who ask you to kill single bears and collect some cabbage start fighting superior enemies, like master vampires and dragons, without any hesitation with their bare fists, just to die basically instantly. I am aware of mods that are taking care of this issue, or at least try to, but I dislike using more mods than absolutely necessary and if there is any way to make those pointless attacks stop by means, which are already in the game, then I am going to choose those.

How is it possible that the main questline of a paid DLC, which is so messed up, that neither the USKP nor the use of the console is able to fix it completely, did apparently not get fixed by the official pages at all? This problem seems to be far from being unknown, so it is beyond my comprehension why they did not do anything about it yet. It seems to be one of the most important things to fix, especially since it is the key to making those annoying attacks stop.

Is there really no way to do anything about this, except for replaying multiple hours of boring radiant quests and thereby possible causing the events, which I am trying to stop, to reoccur?

Gstaff is certainly not deliberately lying, however, I don't think he is not being very clear about what he is talking about. I think that quote may be referring to certain radiant quests where

(1) The USKP and the DLC equivalents are a work in progress and are not associated with Bethesda; they are the collaborative work of a third-party community of modders. It is possible that at some point the Unofficial Patches may provide a fix for this particular issue, but that will not be possible unless someone can figure out what is causing the problem to begin with, which can be extremely hard to do in some cases.

(2) Bethesda's official patches have never directly fixed things with the DLCs, only the base game.

(3) To the best of my knowledge, no. If it makes you feel any better, I have run into similar bugs in the game that have caused me to lose countless hours of progress in the game and I know it's frustrating, but there is little that can be done about it. The only advice I can give you for the future is to make sure that you save a lot and back older saves up to a different location on your PC (if there are too many in your Skyrim folder).

There is no evidence within the CK that radiant quests being done following the conclusion of the quest line for the vampires has any risk at all of causing a vampire attack on cities. Those end with the conclusion of Kindred Judgment.

Because there's a mountain of game data involved in these quest lines for things which are seemingly unrelated at first look. It took us forever before it became obvious that Kindred Judgment could be blocked by those dogs being dead.

If you still have a save game where this quest is guaranteed to fail to start, we'd appreciate getting hold of a copy of it to see if there's some other bit of illogical data we missed.