I am currently thinking about this topic as well as the fps stuff in order to hopefully amend the rules in a way that would be good for the game. But to address the specific questions here, my general thoughts are like this:
What if I pause to enter precise inputs to land a trick? This is allowed in Super Monkey Ball and is used numerous times in their runs.
So this is an interesting comparison because I have also brought up SMB in the discord discussions, and I think it's interesting to look at how they implement the pause rules. In RTA, they frequently use pausing as a way to pull off tricks that are more difficult in real time, but in IL runs they banned pausing very early on in the game's history. For RTA I think all can agree that it's at least a reasonable logic being used; pausing to find setup frames loses you real time, but if you do it correctly you get a reward by ultimately saving time. So there is a risk tradeoff in RTA even though it's pretty obvious that the risk-reward ratio is skewed in favour of pausing a lot. But the logic behind it at least makes sense. The more interesting part is IL runs, which is pretty much what MB speedrunning consists of. In SMB it is blatantly obvious that pausing gives a huge advantage, look at Advanced floor 11 and Expert floor 9 to see the most egregious examples of how much you gain from pausing.
However, we also have to remember that there are differences between the games. SMB runs at a consistent 60fps and will slow down gameplay rather than just lowering fps (which is generally what MB does) if it can't handle everything on screen. So in essence, SMB is less prone to fps trickery than MB even though you can fairly easily learn to pause on every frame in SMB. And this is where another big point needs to be made. in SMB, you can easily "spam pause" (i.e. pausing on every frame) by just alternating between the B button and Start. This is how the two floors mentioned above get a whole new level of gameplay if pausing is allowed. The other way to use pausing is to find setup frames. This is fairly easy in theory but fairly tedious in practice. You just do something like:
step 1: hold forward until 58.30
step 2: hold diagonal left until 56.00
step 3: let go of the stick until 55.88
step 4: hold diagonal right until you finish
This is not very hard to pull off for someone with a bit of experience due to how you can reliably pause on every frame. The hard part is finding which frames to do what on.
So let's look at how this applies to MB. Just like in SMB, a run recorded with the game's internal recording system doesn't show any pauses. So in theory you could pull off both of these pausing techniques in MB too. But in practice there are multiple issues that make it a lot harder. The main problem is that finding exact frames is a lot harder due to MB having a lot more of them per second, and the fact that every computer is different (as we have seen with all IC levels) which makes this an inherently inconsistent trick in MB. Compare with SMB where everyone plays on the same standardised Gamecube/XBOX/PS2 which allows the pause setups to work for every person who tries it. And the Gamecube standard controllers also have notches for the sticks, which is why you can also reliably find the exact directions you want (up, down, left, right, and the diagonals). This is also something we generally don't have in MB. You can of course plug in a controller and play PQ with it, but it would also require you to play the whole level with the camera stationary, since you would otherwise mess up the setup (arrow keys and mouse movement is too unreliable). This also makes it so that setups for MB will likely never be used to break WRs, since having constant diagonal movement is so crucial.
The other way that pausing is used to help break records is spam pausing. By pausing on every frame, or even just every 0.1 seconds, you can effectively make the game slow down and improve your gameplay. There is also no hard limit to how often you can pause the game in MB, if you're fast enough you can have pauses that are less than 0.01s long, if you'd want that kind of pausing. And as we have discussed, this can't be directly detected in the game's internal recordings. I broke the PQ record for Marble Materials Lab in PQ (worse than Mazik's MBG record) after just minutes of playing around with pausing and fps changes (though the fps discussion is for another day).
So I think that, if we compare with SMB, pause abuse is less useful, but still useful to an extent. Several people have already pointed out the benefit of pausing to calm down nerves or to make a decision. So the question I ask myself is "what is best for the community?". I personally am strongly against pausing at all during speedruns, especially in MB. But if we are to ban pausing we'd need a way to verify that a run was done without it, which would probably require something like what they do in the SMB community, i.e. require a live recording of when the record was broken, like when you stream your gameplay. I don't think anyone in the community wants this to be the case as it would make speedrunning much more annoying. So another way of looking at it is about fairness. Pausing being against the spirit of the game is one thing, but if everyone is allowed to pause as much as they want, at least it's fair, right? I am leaning more and more towards just allowing pausing in MB runs purely because I think it's the most reasonable way to do it for the community as a whole. On a personal level I absolutely consider a run using pauses to be illegitimate and worse in every way.
So to summarise: Pausing can and already is being used to improve speedruns in MB. Pausing cannot be effectively detected without a very harsh rule change that no one wants to implement. Pausing is at least not as potent as in Super Monkey Ball. I personally don't like it.
What if I pause to catch my nerves after a tricky section? This is banned in Minecraft speedruns.
My personal opinion about this is the same as above, I don't like it and would not have it if I could decide. But I also think that calming nerves is much less of an offense compared to spam pausing or frame setups. So if we allow those tricks then calming nerves must also be allowed.
What if I put a desk fan over the escape key and have it pause/unpause at 60 times per second? That sounds pretty "tool" assisted to me.
What if I just manually mash the pause key real fast? Bind it to something like numpad+ which I can hit with my mouse hand. Then I don't know.
I will answer both questions at once here. The thing is that this is an unavoidable consequence of allowing pausing. If we don't enforce live recordings of records then the loophole in the ruleset will be abused. Luckily I am the most adept at abusing these nonsense tricks (see: ctrl-p) and I have found that even pushed to its limit, it's still not nearly as powerful as in SMB. I managed to use some rebinding of buttons to pause 200 times in one second, which is also consistent. This allows for more precise jumps, for example. But it is also reasonably contained. Do you want to improve your Gauntlet edge hit ratio? Yes you can absolutely do it with pausing, (I already beat my PB this way). But at the same time the way that levels are made in MB makes it so that you can't really play a whole level with constant pausing. No one is gonna pull off a TAS-like path on MtM just by pausing a lot.
Do I think it's cheating? Yes. Do I hate that it's possible? Yes. Will it be the end of MB speedrunning? Probably not.
Macroing vs Cheating: Where would you draw the line?
