Portal hopping gives benefit specifically to 1 faction, making it unfair for every other faction.
A reaper who is hunting ships spends the time to level up his flag. At the risk of not finding enough/any emissaries when he makes it to level 5. Which is little to no loss, as you can sell everything at the reaper and get more money than any other faction.
Another emissary does the same thing, at the risk of being hunted down by reapers and losing their hard earned work/loot.
Now all of the above is fairly balanced if you ask me. But when you introduce portals you give reapers the following unfair benefit:
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A reaper can level up, sell all his stuff, and then portal hop until he finds a victim, he keeps all his money and his flag.
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Another emissary suddenly gets a lvl5 reaper in his server with no warning, and even if they are not in the middle of say a vault, and are fully aware of the map, they cannot take advantage of this benefit. They cannot escape the portal because they will lose their loot. And the functionality is POINTLESS to say a gold hoarder. Why would a gold hoarder lvl 5 with no loot server hop? To do PVE in another server? I guess he could if there's too many reapers in his server, but only at that specific time when he has no loot and he is about to do something else.
You solve this simply by removing the flag same as you remove loot when portal hopping, or resetting it to lvl1. And its 100% equal to every faction.
Or you could reset it to half (lvl 2.5 or 3 if you are 5).
I play reaper a lot, and I enjoy it, and I have abused portal hopping, but from a balance standpoint I do recognise it offers MOST (not all) of its advantages to 1 faction only.
