I am a moderator for Clustertruck and I am wondering what is the opinion of other runners from other communities with IGT for the IGT system we are developing. For context on what I am going to discuss, Clustertruck is a game where you platform on trucks through 90 levels. You also have abilities you can switch out for in the main menu too.

Right now working with some friends we have found a way to remove the load time and transitions in between levels using IGT, but now the question has become "should the autosplitter be paused when switching abilities in the main menu?"

This is extremely important because it completely changes how any% is ran for the game. If switching abilities caused no time loss, you could switch abilities to get large amounts of time save in specific levels. Previously, you would be locked to a single ability since its better in 90% of cases, and switching caused too much time loss.

Are there other games that use IGT that pause for any other reason besides transitions between levels or loading? I will eventually setup a poll for the Clustertruck community since its important to represent the community as a moderator and not my own interests, but I think its important to hear other perspectives on this first.

tl:dr IGT pausing in the main menu for time save benefits?

This is coming from the perspective of somebody who primarily runs games timed with real-time, but personally I feel very strongly that the timer should only pause on loads and nowhere else. The main purpose of using something other than real-time is just to equalize loads so everyone's on a level playing field in that regard, having it do anything other than that doesn't make sense to me unless there's a specific purpose for it (for example, pausing on game crashes is fairly reasonable, especially if the game is particularly crash-prone), especially if it's going to have that dramatic of an effect on the run. Playing the game in an objectively slower way (real-time) just because the timing method is different just feels... wrong to me.

I will point out that Celeste's timer does not consider menuing time between levels (although there are little benefits to using the menu besides taking a break). That said, this is more an exception than the norm; most people may be used to systems such as @ShikenNuggets suggests. If your game does not have any precedent (like an in-game timer built in) then it may be best to leave this up to the community.