I have no idea if this sort of change would be easy or hard, given bots games are the easiest way to gain reliability as a new user/player on this site.

An easier, faster change might be to up the default phase length for bots games? I assume 3 days was picked because it seemed reasonable, but maybe it should be 5 days or even the maximum 10 days? If there are no negative side effects? Only thing I can think of is maybe a new person waiting the entire phase length instead of clicking ready.

Agreed. I lost a ton of reliability from CD'ing a bot game.

It also means there are quite a lot of games I can't join due to my reliability being so low even though I've never actually played a game with real people.

I am very bad at remembering to click pause, and i think it was actually 48 hours.
I mean it's not that bad but it would be nice if it didn't happen.

Just remember to hit the pause button the next time. 21 hours isn't that bad.

So I play against bots, and i forget to pause the games, which for some reason counts as me being unreliable, even though they are games against bots, so now I can't start games for 21 hours.

I'm not sure if this is code-able but it would be nice if games against bots didn't count for unreliability.