A8 Farming

[Zojha]

If everything was guaranteed immediately, the issue then arises that nobody does anything more than once.

That's something that can be adjusted via different caps. Want people to run M4 four times per week on average? Put a 4 token cap there, 16 tokens buy an item.
All token systems do is to even out the amount of times you need to run the content among all participants and prevent you from leaving without any progression towards the goal you wanted to achieve by running the content.

IMO, gambling simply has no place in gearing, despite the tradition it has in MMOs. That's a matter best left to our resident casino, aka the gold saucer.

[Greedalox]

IMO, gambling simply has no place in gearing, despite the tradition it has in MMOs. That's a matter best left to our resident casino, aka the gold saucer.

RNG isn't in MMO's all nilly willy for no reason. RNG adds longevity, and you can see it as 2 ways- lazy designing where they should add enough content each patch that people can burn through once and still feel like they got some play time out of the patch, or just that, it's there to supplement the fact that MMO teams for the most part could never create enough content per patch to keep the online 6/7 days a week occupied.

[Zojha]

RNG adds longevity[...]

So do token systems. What's the difference between a quest that has you kill 10 boars and another that asks for a boar liver with 10% drop chance? On the grand scale, next to none. People will on average kill roughly 10 boars and finish the quest. Maybe 9.786 boars, maybe 10.721 boars, but somewhere around 10. A single person however might have to slaughter 1000 boars for that stupid liver - a statistical outlier that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
And that is the only difference between tokens and RNG. With tokens, statistical outliers don't exist, everyone gets the exact same reward for the exact same amount of effort.