So, I've been watching the speedrun community for about a year now, and I've only just made an account to upload some of my own runs soon. Anyways.

I want to start a (public) discussion about the pausing in speedrunning. Especially after the new (yet still unverified) run of Brentilda (good job by the way, nice work!), it might be time to do so for FUTURE (!) runs. Just wanted to hear what you guys think.

For several reasons I won't go into too much detail on my opinion (right now), but in general I am for a policy that goes somewhat like: You are allowed to pause your run ONCE (without the F3 menu open in the background) after the timer started (so you can still pause at the very beginning for world loading).

Pausing could give you a potential advantage, even though everyone could technically do it (working on a possbible proof i found on why it still could give an uneven advantage) and for me personally it doesn't feel like RSG anymore. The reason why I don't watch glitched speedruns is because RSG has some kind of flow to it that makes it way more entertaining for me. The newest WR just lost this for me.

I would go for no pause at all, but there always could be a case where you just need to pause the game for some real life stuff, and I don't think a policy should screw up a good run for something way more important than speedrunning.

Thats all for now, looking forward to your thoughts on this topic

What advantage?

Decision making, trigonometric calculations to best locate the stronghold, abuse of pauses during the one cycle to inflict maximum damage ... and many other things that can abuse pauses.

Everybody can do that so how is it an advantage?

"trigonometric calculations to best locate the stronghold" will be added to the final time anyways with the rules we have now.

You asked "What advantage?" which is not very specific, but pauses can have advantages over not pausing which is what he made a small list of

I might be extremely uncultured, but I feel that pausing should be allowed, depending on the situation, in glitchless and main game as it is most definitely not a glitch. However, pausing detracts from the speedrun aspect of it and no-one wants to see a barrage of pausing unless it's a game like Wind Waker where you have to pause a shit ton to get barrier skip (or another trick that saves an extreme amount of time). So I believe that pausing should be banned if it's to calculate where to go next, but accidentally pausing or pausing because something very bad happened (e.g. someone fell and they need assistance) should not result in the run being invalidated.

Would love to hear others' thoughts on the topic.

I dont think pausing should invalidate your speedrun i just think it should add to the time. And if something happened where you had to pause i guess thats just unfortunate, and the problem with that is that you could make that an excuse if you paused somewhere in the run to gather thoughts calm nerves or other stuff.

Why dont we just do a pause limit (excluding render distance and fov) and every pause past the limit counts towards time.

that sounds stupid why would that help anything 😂

I think it is best to just allow pauses, as there is a lot going into how to limit pauses, I feel like it would just be easier and more simple to just allow pauses, but I do think that we should ban the use of f3+esc, as that provides a large advantage, and there is no reason to do it over normal pausing if something comes up (you need to use the restroom, you need to help someone with something, your dog needs something, etc).

You can abuse the fact that something in real life was affecting your speedrun.

Honestly people are gonna argue about this for ages but the system has worked for a while its probably fine to just keep it the same.

Yoopicul, in my solution, you cant. I'm saying that a normal pause is allowed no matter what, but an f3+esc pause is never allowed, there is no way to abuse something happening IRL because you can always pause normally no matter the reason.

sorry didnt notice that but a normal pause can still be abused and could be taken to the extreme like taking screenshots, watching back vod or something

So I know what cookie wants to say with his question. As I said, I can't/won't go to far into the detail right now but to put it as simple as possible: There could be a certain circumstance where you could gain an advantage when pausing in a nether which is depending on the seed and therefore not everyone can do that. That's all I can say right now. Me and a few mates are working on that right now, for obvious reasons we won't talk about it in further detail.

My proposal however does have a flaw as well, since it's not involving setting the FOV or something like that. Maybe pausing should be added as IGT always, and only loading between dimensions should get removed from the IGT. Or a combination where you're allowed to pause for FOV/entity distance settings and maybe one extra pause. I think if you limit the amount of pauses you again can give everyone at least some type of equal chances.

Piboi: That's correct. I'm bringing this up now since it has been a huge thing in the newest wr and is getting more popular. And as I said, it wouldn't be a problem if everyone has the same chances (like you have right now with: pause while triangulate or pause in F3 to check coords, or...)

However, couri just said that there are new rules coming up soon(-ish), so let's wait that out. However as it seemed it does not involve changing anything regarding pausing, but he didn't give anything away (just want to make sure that he did not spoil anything!)

guys don't do this pointless discussion, just vouch for rta - loads :admirAAAAAAAA:

Hansi, while I do agree with a lot of your points, I believe limiting pauses can also be abused, and I think it can give better hardware an advantage (hear me out). Let's say I have a potato pc and get 3fps for the first 5 seconds of a world be created, and use my pause. If I only get one pause, I just used it up. Let's say I have an intel i9 9900k and an RTX 3090, and I can get hundreds of fps in the first few seconds upon world creation, and do not have to use up my pause. Now I have a free pause whenever I want and someone with a potato pc has already used theirs up. No matter how many pauses you give, someone with a potato pc will have one less pause than someone with a 5k dollar computer. Also, If you get an advantage from pausing on one seed and not another, that is really more of an advantage of the seed than pausing. This is similar to divine travel in the nether, having fossils in a 0,0 chunk is an advantage of pointing to the stronghold, but you can't ban people from using it, as all seeds have a chance of it happening and some seeds are just luckier than others. Lastly Koos1, I believe this is an important discussion on whether or not a large part of recent mc speedruns are abusing pauses.

In my opinion I want there to be no pausing to look around but adjusting fov, checking cords, etc. would be allowed

My thoughts, banned or not, the use of pausing when your triangulating and looking around is somewhat contrary to speedruning rsg. At least for me, rgs is all about your critical thinking, knowing what you need, how much you need, when you can leave. If you are slow making those decisions you are losing time... unless you are abusing pauses. Another skill you need is an understanding of the world generation, and using that to find lava and then a fortress, bastion, and the gold/spawners respectively. Pausing takes away from that, you are playing on a new world every time, you need to be able to spot structures as fast as possible, even with just a glance. Pausing gives you time to do ALL of this when the time has essentially stopped. If pausing is banned, it should be for the same reason that calculators are banned.

Edit, my fsg on is a 21 minute, (no video I accidentally deleted it, long story), tho I do have a sub 25 fsg with video evidence. So I'm not a top runner in ANY SENSE, but I will say this, my computer is a notebook from 2013, I dont even pause that much, I barely pause at all for chunk loading at spawn or in the nether. The wr run in amazing, but you cannot say that the pausing is for chunk loading, whether or not that is bad or not is up to you...