I think there is a misleading understanding of the purpose and gain from official pauses in general. If we take a look at other esport titles, a lot of them have native pause support and I guess we all agree that such a kind of game implementation where the current state is completely saved and doesn't change until the game continues is perfect. But in GOIO we don't have a feature like that so let's take a look at pauses in other sports.
In football there are two common "types" of pauses: irregular play and injuries. Like in GOIO since football is not an electronic sport it is not possible to have a "fair" pause. In fact when the referee calls a pause in a football match, the game gets reset, be it by a foul, ball out of field of play or an injured player. The latter case is comparable to our situation. In football the teams can still keep playing until they shoot the ball out off the field or if they don't do it, the referee halts the game. To continue the game, the referee drops to ball between one player of each team but usually the team that had the ball before gets it by the other team (check out
Wikipedia).
So how this compare to our pause rules? Like in any other competitive sport, there are rules to enforce equal conditions to all participants and there is at least one person to make sure the rules hold - the referee. Some of us maybe have played football or another comparable sport themselves and know, playing for fun doesn't necessarily need a referee because everyone knows the basic rules, but sometimes people disagree about interpretation of the rules and it needs a third party with a neutral point of view. Fortunately with GOIO being an esport, the game itself ensures the game is played like it is supposed to (limited amount of players, tools, ships, static spawns, valid damage etc.). But for competitive events like the SCS there is a fairly small ruleset on top of it like time limit and also game pauses. And like everything that is not directly supported by the game itself, these additional rules are to some extent an interpretation of the referee. Arguing against pauses because they are not supported by the game is not a qualified argument.
Let's look for example at the time limit: Is the game ending ten seconds too late because the referee took longer to load into the game? No, the referee says when the game ended, even if it might be 10sec too late, that's the official end. The pause rule is just an additional element that needs special treatment out of GOIO's native features - and comes with human errors.
We are all friends here but I can tell from my own experience playing football, even with friends sometimes you can get very heated if there is no neutral party to interpret some game rules. Often enough I also hated the football referee for weird decisions but that is much more better than hating the opposing team. It is the referee's fault, not the fault of the other team. Another good thing, the referee is usually seen as "instance" like Dementio already mentioned, even pulling away more personal hate. We are also already really casual with our referees often being related to a participating team.
The requirements of GOIO pause rules are fortunately much less complicated than football rules so they are much easier to accomplish and also introduce less possible mistakes by the referee.
To sum my thoughts up: I very strongly hold on official pauses, the referee is a "buffer" between teams, any negativity about rule interpretation goes to the referee (to err is still human). But as this discussion shows we should tweak them, taking into account moving cloud cover. The problem I see is sometimes teams don't know they will be visible if they stay there, maybe the referee can pm them to backup into a specific direction? Also I'm glad most votes agree with my opinion about official pauses needed.
