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Afflicted Refugees


Dragonfire12

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Quest WEJS14 controls the Afflicted Refugees.  In the Skyrim SE Unofficial Patch the Run Once Flag has been removed from WEJS14.  This has the effect of filling the roads with Afflicted Refugees.

I found this through Google, Reddit, etc., and nowhere have I found any reference to the BUG that was fixed by this change.  Only statements of disruption to the game, namely that the Afflicted Refugees displace other spawned events preventing them from occurring.  Now, I know that most of the posters on these sites don't know what they are talking about, so I wanted to ask here, since I can't find the answer anywhere else.

What BUG was fixed by removing the Run Once Flag from WEJS14?   Are these spawns a zero sum, in other words, does adding so many Afflicted Refugees displace other spawned event?

One thing I have noticed it the near total lack of Dark Brotherhood Assassins vs. Oldrim.  Is there any validity to what I read that rare spawns are being pushed out by the sheer numbers of Afflicted Refugees?

Like I said, It wouldn't surprise me to find out that what I have been reading was nonsense, which is why I wanted to ask you directly.

Thank you for you time and consideration.

DF12.  

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If the roads are getting filled with afflicted refugees, that means that you have another mod overriding the fix in the patch for that issue (Bug #17360). Timing is Everything apparently conflicted with our fix at one point. I don't know if that's still the case or not.

There's a common misunderstanding about how the Run Once flag works -- apparently even the developers didn't completely understand it. "Run Once" doesn't mean the quest will only ever run one time and then never again. Its purpose is to prevent the scripts associated with these random encounter quests from resetting themselves properly. As a result, a number of them (including WESJ14) appeared to not clean up properly with the flag checked; NPC corpses would remain in the area forever. Even though the encounters technically did clean up, the scripts didn't reset, so when the game selected the encounter again it ran, but then it was left in a corrupt state. This then caused the particular encounter trigger to glitch out and stop working for the rest of the game.

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Thank you for clearing that up, the Run Once Flag, that is.  As for Afflicted Refugees, when I say I'm running into them all the time, it isn't like I'm tripping over them.  I try not to fast travel or use Carriages.  I run or Convienent Horses from place to place and it seem that all the common spawn points for encounters are filled by Afflicted Refugees.  Occasionally I meet the one who asks if I'm through Oggoling the Grotesque (the quest giver).  Talking to Kesh and running the quest stops that one NPC from spawing but does not stop the Affliced Refugees from continuing to fill up the spawn points.

I used XEdit to restore the Run Once Flag to WESJ14 as a test .  I'm not running into Afflicted Refugees all the time and I got attacked by a Dark Brotherhood Assassin (something that almost never happens in SSE).  I did this after I made the above post and already got attacked by the Assassin.  I read the post you linked to Bug #17360 and I do not have Timing is Everything running (not even downloaded).

The only mods I have that modify events are to block thieves in Riften/Riverwood (WIThief01Script), and block Vampire Attacks during an Eclipse (Level 70+ I think) [mine-edits DLC1WEQuestsEclipseActive [SMQN:02017869] Boolean Condition from 1 AND to 2 AND so the Condition can never be met].  Other than that I don't have anything that I can think of that could affect releasing an Afflicted Horde upon Skyrim.  

EDIT:  What lead me to AFK MODS in the first place was Google, searching for what was causing Dark Brotherhood Assassins to never spawn.  Over and over I tried different Google searches until I found a post that suggested restoring the Run Once Flag to WESJ14 because it was blocking rare spawns.  As I said, who know if that person knows what they are talking about, that's why I came here to ask.

Edited by Dragonfire12
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As Pete has explained already, the encounter is repeating itself to silly levels due to a mod conflict caused by something else. In a game where that's not at issue, the quest staging is properly updated once the encounter has been run and there will be no further generations of it even if you ignore it from that point on.

Messing with things in xEdit is simply going to break stuff, invalidate our fix, and leave you with a mess, so I'd suggest you not do that. You've got to be using some kind of mod that's broken the quest itself, like Timing is Everything, which was known to have this issue and it's not know whether it was ever fixed properly. Restoring the flag will break the entire quest chain if you happen to not actually encounter the Afflicted it generates and it will then become impossible to get the rest of the quest line to trigger at all. So you need to trust that we know what we're doing here.

That mod you're using to block vampire attacks could well be the cause of your entire problem. In SSE, those random attacks no longer take place after the 1.5.3 patch 2 years ago. So any mod messing with that is completely unnecessary and is likely to generate problems rather than solve them.

Bottom line is that the person who suggested it was our fault doesn't know what they're talking about. If said post was on reddit, that's almost certainly the case because those people have an active hatred of our work and will go out of their way to cast blame at us because most of them have no clue how to troubleshoot an issue correctly or they assume we changed something because of personal preference reasons rather than it being an actual bug.

You're asking us for an explanation and we've given it to you. If you don't accept that, fine, but we also have a very low tolerance for explaining how something works and then having that ignored to continue going on about it based on bullshit information propagated by redditors.

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First, I never intended to piss you off.  I shouldn't have mentioned XEdit, I'm sorry.

There is an event in Game called a Lunar Eclipse, where the two moons align as one.  This is monitored by a global variable (DLC1EclipseActive [GLOB:0200A26E]) toggled 0/1.  During the Lunar Eclipse Vampire Attacks will still spawn.  DLC1WEQuestsEclipseActive [SMQN:02017869] part of the Story Manager Quest Node tree.  I've seen it happen and killed the vampire, of course you don't have to believe me.

I have found and removed a mod that was causing the issue with the Afflicted Refugees.  It was a very old mod and I have no idea why it was causing the Afflicted Refugees to spawn out of control:  Strange Voodoo.  It's gone now and so is the problem.  I started a New Game and have encountered the Afflicted who gives the quest, just him and I have been attacked by a Dark Brotherhood Assassin before I even left the Riverwood/Whiterun area.  

I'm retired now, I was a lab manager in charge of laser research.  Take this off and put this on and see what happens.  I get it that programers don't understand that process.  When I put back the Run Once Flag I thought I was clear that I had done it as a test because I was having trouble with the quest, not because I thought you made a mistake.  I was looking for information trying to solve a problem, I won't bother you here again...

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Something to keep in mind - we aren't programmers either. We're gamers who mod the game. That's all. I understand that you came here for information on the problem, but the thing is, we both gave you exactly the information you needed but you kept posting as though what we said wasn't worth listening to. And yet, as it turns out, we were in fact right since you found the offending mod and removed it and the problem went away exactly as expected. You could have saved yourself a bit of hassle by looking into the information we gave you instead of trying to convince us that the flag should be put back on when we already know that's not going to do anything useful.

As far as those eclipse attacks, that event cannot be triggered without you causing the eclipse yourself and THAT event is one that Bethesda has not disabled in the game. I was referring to the random attacks that are not triggered by the player. Those events have been disabled in an official patch. I'm assuming because Bethesda finally got tired of all of the support emails that set of events caused with dead NPCs all over the cities that the player may not even have known were there.

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On 5/9/2020 at 11:01 AM, Dragonfire12 said:

I get it that programers don't understand that process

Ahem, only some of us are programmers, even senior or distinguished programmers, but have also been very senior managers. Or as a former colleague once phrased it: "I route, therefore you exist."

Others are not. But we all understand the process of elimination and Occam's Razor.

On 5/9/2020 at 11:01 AM, Dragonfire12 said:

I won't bother you here again...

Please don't be discouraged. Keep in mind that folks generally don't like it implied that they are idiots or didn't understand you. There is a wealth of experience here fixing Bethesda bugs going back at least a decade or more.

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