You don't need splits but you do need a timer. But I recommend splits because they give you information on how much time you lost/saved and many other useful information.
As the game was really new, we were deciding which was the best way to time it... IGT, RTA, RTA Without loads... We came to a conclusion that RTA Without loads is the best option and since then I was only verifying some runs that used the Load Removal, so runs in RTA + loads were not getting verified because the load remover was in its test stages and it was really inconsistent, now we have a new oficial load remover that is on Live Split itself and I can start to manually remove loads, since its more consistent now, since there's a couple runs waiting to get verified and the run is pretty long with a lot of loadings in it, it'll take more 2~3 days to retime everybody's runs. Sorry for making you wait so long.