I have a proposal for timing that I want to share with the community instead of forcing it into place (that's bad moderating). I've posted this in the Series forum as well.

There is a file timer in the games, and as this would be a universal timer and is common to use in other communities (e.g. Sonic, 007 Agent Under Fire, Axiom Verge), this would be a good use, but also a possibly bad use.

Advantages:

• Universal timer - Game-time is more reliable than real-time in terms of loading times and lag (although the 3DS doesn't have problems with these, if I recall correctly)
• Runners without a capture card can post proof as a picture of their file with the time, opening the game up to more people

Disadvantages:

• Runners without video proof may also be able to get away with segmented runs, which would be against the new ruleset if game-time was implemented
• Current runs may be invalid unless they either a) know the game-time or b) use real-time as game-time

However, currently some runners with only split proof have been accepted; this may hopefully address the disadvantages, as using both real-time with splits along with game-time should be enough proof, and may also be able to roughly distinguish the difference between real-time and game-time so that current runs can have an estimated game-time.

These are just my thoughts. Like I said, I think it'd open up the games to more people who want to run it but don't have a capture card, at the cost of a little bit of vulnerability to cheaters.

I don't know if my word counts for anything but i would say using in game time could work well, because i just cant afford a 3ds capture card.

After thinking over it, there's one major issue I forgot - saving and quitting. The in-game timer can be manipulated by saving and quitting (Edge_rydia's Any% Easy PB's in-game time would be a segmented time). Although, it could help to figure out what the difference is between in-game and real-time when you don't save and quit. This way, it would be easier to verify whether the in-game time seems right or not. If the 3DS has no loading, lag, or frame-rate differences across regions (which, along with most handhelds, should be correct), then RTA and in-game will have the same difference every time. However, this will mean either banning saving and quitting (creating a new Any% NoS+Q) which will mean some current runs are invalid, or in-game time will be irrelevant altogether, as the time submitted will need to compare correctly to RTA, but will not be correct in the proof picture if there was saving and quitting. It's a complicated mess now, so in-game time won't be implemented, unless people agree to no saving and quitting. No-capture-card people will have to go back to submitting splits for now. :/

Okay, new idea. Sonic Heroes uses Game Time and the community says that a Game Over voids the run. We could do this to the letter, but as this is a much longer game, I'd say that we could use game time, but any resets (or, S+Q) will make it so that RTA has to be used (we can use Japanese RTA timing, which is at the last save of the game, after the credits, so that game-time should be equal if not faster than RTA). With this, though, I'd much rather just make a new subcategory. I just want a way so that the people without capture cards can compete at some level without being suspected as a cheater, instead of their proof being based off splits, which is easily suspicious, but I also don't want to void the current runs.

Any news about this? Using in-game time is fine by me.

I think we'll have to stick with RTA for now. Trying to make IGT work would make it a complicated mess. IGT could only work if every run was deathless and had no saving and quitting, plus, changing to RTA if a run needs to restart a checkpoint would make the IGT irrelevant and so RTA would become the default leaderboard timing, meaning IGT isn't worth it. IGT won't become the main timing method. We could, however, have it on but have RTA default, and a videoless run could take a picture of the IGT, and submit it with their RTA splits as double-proof. Even if the IGT is segmented by saving and quitting, the RTA will be correct, but the IGT picture will be extra proof that a legitimate run has been done. This is probably the best we can do.