Free Step Dodge

I don't think it's dying; I just think a lot of people believe that sabotage is the fairest form of flattery. The game attracted over 100 players to the TGS tournament and numbers have been high for the big tournaments. Much higher than they really ever got for 5... and by a large margin too.

What about other tournament numbers? Are they higher? I have watched most of DOA5 tournaments but cannot remember numbers by memory. Just curious.

80-90 for bigger events like Summer Jam and CEO. I remember when DOA5 vanilla was only bringing in 30-45 players for a big event.

high for DoA standards, laughably low compared to others considering the game is somewhat still new

It's just the prize money that increased the players number in tournaments, not the quality of the game. As soon as TN will stop financing these tournaments watch the number drop lower than the lowest DOA5 had.

Near 80 at SummerJam 13 was solid, making DOA6 the 3rd best drawing game there. But yeah, on average, DOA6 has been doing better at tournaments than DOA5 did (though DOA5U & DOA5LR did pretty solid). Hell, DOA6 got 49 entrants at VSFighting in the UK, whereas I don't think any European DOA tournament has broken, like, 32 entrants before ever.

To put things in perspective, there's never been a time that DOA has ever been "thriving" competitively, some people just love to believe that DOA6 is doing worse on average compared to other DOA's competitively.