I wasn't sure if I should put this into the troubleshooting section or not, because I'm not sure if it's actually a bug.

In all the time I've played this game, since 11/11/11, I've never had so many encounters with Afflicted Refugees. I'd see one sometime after I hit level 20, talk to him to get the objective to talk to Kesh, and I'd never see another one again.

This time, though, almost all of my random encounters in the wild have been with Afflicted. Just today, I traveled with Delphine from Riverwood to Kynesgrove. I had about five encounters in the wild, three of which were Afflicted Refugees. The other two were Talsgar and a flame atronach over a witch's body. And I've seen Afflicted several times before that, a few days ago.

The hell is happening here? Has this happened to anyone else?

Afflicted Refugees will start appearing when the player character reaches level 10, most often they spawn if you fast travel. They will spawn more often if you never talk to them (at least it seems that way in my games). I kinda like watching them fight because they spew their green goo at their enemies, hehe. This is the wiki info for http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Afflicted_Refugee.

That's the thing though, I've talked to them plenty already, and I haven't been fast traveling much. Like I said, after talking to the first one, I'd pretty much never see another again outside of the quest itself. In this playthrough though, for whatever reason, I'm running into them all the damn time and not seeing a lot of the other random encounters I usually see.

Perhaps Peryite really really wants your attention! I think it's a lot like vampires, I almost never have vampire encounters in my games even with DG, but others seem to be overrun with vamps. Perhaps some flag got set in your save and now there's just a high proportion of Afflicted Refugees. It would be interesting to go back to a save pre level 10, resave from it and try again to see if the same game source gets the same result. Just wish Peryite gave us the spew ability instead of his shield, but that's just me.

Don't think I have any saves that far back with this character. I'll probably just cave and do the quest to get rid of them all. I can also attest to the insane amount of vampires lol, get them all the time with Dawnguard. On the other hand, I almost never get random dragon attacks anymore, thanks to one of the later official patches. I actually miss fighting them in cities and in Raven Rock and Tel Mithryn. I'll have to see if there's a mod for that.

I dunno though, Spellbreaker's been pretty useful to me, especially against dragons. I'm pretty happy with that as a reward over spewing. XD