The prices on DUCs now, is... Well, I think I never saw that many G's, ever. I'm including every G I ever earned on all toons combined.
It's probably at least partly due to you can't speed run Warlord anymore. The speed runs were half the fun of running through Harmon Labs. Magic Time. I think I never fully understood how they worked but I had most of it explained to me, and, like many CO players, I enjoy getting from Start to Finish in the shortest time, right down to the millisecond. This is probably due to we've all ran all the queues a billion times and this is the challenge that survives.
Now you have to scrapperlock your way through the entire thing, from start to finish, leaving no Mob un...arrested. Luckily, Warlord is still fun enough and the lewt is still uber enough. Even the Common lewts in Warlord used to give, like, 5G to a vendor before they changed its quality to common(?).. Now it gives like 2 Locals. That wasn't too popular with me, either. Warlord does at least still payoff similarly to a Smash, leaving it with an above average - average lewt.
I always liked running Warlord since my first toon (Unleashed) and I didn't even know what the uber rare lewt was. It's still fun to run (pinball?) the gauntlet to Warlord, and, this queue's still got the most coveted lewt. I'll be running at least an hour or so of it before it poofs unless it poofs today!