TL;DR: The challenge is to maintain a playing schedule of 20 games a week for the entire Season 1 of 2014! To see how many have already joined and join yourself, click here
These days the ladder is harder then ever. Many have fallen — and only the few, the proud remain to rise up to The Challenge.
The challenge to face your fears and obstacles, to overcome anxiety and rage, and to defeat procrastination. The challenge to maintain a playing schedule of 20 games a week for the entire Season 1 of 2014!
It begins January Third. Are you brave enough?
To complete the challenge grants you nothing but to be among those who climbed the ranks and bravely fought to gain ladder points – its motivation to play, and perhaps it will cause you to finally move up a league or place top 8 in your division for the first time. Share your trails, tribulations, and progress here.
- How to participate?
All you need to do to participate for the 2014 Season 1 ladder challenge is go to http://sc2replaystats.com/challenge/display/1 and sign up for the challenge. After that all you need to do is upload all of your ladder 1v1 games. Sc2replaystats offers a free automatic replay-uploader that you can get here: http://sc2replaystats.com/account/download Once you’ve installed this, it will automatically upload your replays to the website after every game you play.
This means that once you’ve signed up and installed the uploader, all your ladder challenge progress will be tracked with no effort from you!
Although you don’t need to do anything else to participate in the challenge, as a bonus of running the challenge this way you will be able to see tons of in-depth statistics for individual replays as well as your overall progress and win-rates on the sc2replaystats website.
The first season of 2014 ladder competition will begin at 12:01 a.m. PST on Friday, January 3; and at that point your games will start counting towards the challenge. But be sure to sign up in advance so it can track your game as you play them when the challenge begins!
- Read here if you have some bad excuse for not participating!
Yes, you. You read the thread and said “this isn’t for me” because you belong to one of three categories: The Lazy, The Anxious, and The Busy. I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong, and you should (try to) participate!
- The Lazy
You don’t want to do this because it sounds like too much work. It’s not too much work. You have to play less than 3 games a day. An average SC2 game lasts less than 15 minutes. Is spending around half an hour playing too much work? The answer: no; it’s not — and if you start to feel lazy, your fellow challengers will motivate you. 
- The Anxious
You don’t want to ladder. You’re afraid of laddering. You rage a lot when laddering. Laddering makes you nervous. You’ve never laddered before.
There are plenty of reasons why laddering just might not be as fun as doing other things for people, and they’re usually awkwardly crammed under one label: Ladder Anxiety.
Following a schedule like this can actually help a lot with anxiety: if you have a set amount of games to play at a certain schedule, it can be easier to get over that initial hump of “fear” and just get to the playing. Having support and encouragement from everyone else in the challenge can help, too. You may find the challenge or having a playing schedule in general is just the thing to help you.
- The Busy
You don’t have time to do this, because of work, school, family, a vacation. This is the best excuse out there, but it can be overcome. Just remember — it’s better to try and fall short then not try at all. There is no shame in trying to participate but dropping out if it gets to be too much for you.
That being said, this can be a great way to fit SC2 into your schedule when you otherwise might not have been able too. If you have a definite slot of time in your scheduled for it; you may find it easier to fit in then if you don’t have a schedule or plan for it. Ordinarily when you are playing you don’t set a number of games for yourself, and it’s dangerously easy to get distracted and play for too long — but with the ladder challenge you know you are going to play a set amount of games or for a set amount of time.
Try it. Maybe you’ll need a slightly lower number of games; or maybe you’ll have to drop it — but no shame in trying!
To all: feel free to post about your progress or any obstacles you run into here!