Mount farming

[ForteNightshade]

I really doubt the content will die without the tiny percentage of players who get extremely unlucky and end up needing over 100 runs. I never understood that argument. The greater majority of players will either stop at 99, ignore the content until echo + drop rate increase or the mount will drop before 99 kills. The players who keep going after 99 are probably 2% or so.

If you managed to kill an EX trial as current content a hundred times, you deserve the mount. You've done your part to keep the content alive. Besides, the devs relying on a small handful of players getting extremely unlucky and still grinding away for 200-500 kills to fill groups for their content would be poor game design, cruel and burn-out inducing. I doubt it's their intention (or at least hope so).

You'd be surprised how many people will actually keep going simply because they don't want to wait six months. Look at how many people throw real money at the Mogstation when 8-12 months later that same item will have a 30% off sale.

The likely intent from the devs is for players to farm periodically throughout the six month window; the whole "take breaks" rhetoric they preach. They're also assuming the players more likely to farm beyond 99 tokens are the better players who will "pick of the slack for inexperienced players." Something to keep in mind, is this sort of constant grind is quite common for Eastern games. And JP PF is extremely active. There is no doubt this system is very much intentional.

It's also counterproductive.
I'll be honest, I'm extremely frustrated that I had to do 300 runs and still don't have a mount yet.

You say it's counterproductive... yet you did exactly what they wanted you to. We can argue whether the same is fair or not, however the results speak for themselves. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the two tokens Diamond drops is them experimenting with how much it impacts PF.