Two random players are assigned the role of team captain, and then they take turns picking the rest of their team. How cool would that be?

Just theory crafting here, but a system like this could be cool.

Why, what's this aimed to solve?

People would be bored while the team captains picked and i think that unless the team captains were good players and very regular players they'd pick quite imba teams.

But you can already do things like this with people you know, just by hosting your own game

I like the idea, but you're probably going to have to code it if you want to see it implemented!

Imo its hard enough to get a game going. This method would make it even harder (imagine that stuff had to be re-done every time when a game needs to be re'd). When we change the way balancing works we need an automated mechanism.

Also as long as the two captains dont have access to a well maintained smurf DB (to query manually :/) I dont expect this mechanism to lead to better balance.

Btw This was proposed months/years ago already.

We discussed this before and there are better ways. Replace the "ready" checkbox with a thumbs up/down voting for the current balance. The server rebalances if the voting does not succeed. All votes are automatically cleared whenever there is any change in the balance.

that seems more cumbersome to me, and it would require more time, except if auto balance is accepted the first time, in most setups.

i don't think there is a problem with the team captain way, regarding smurfs. smurfs could only effectively circumvent being rated accurately when they play only one game in a row only, or by changing their account after every game (which would be cumbersome and suspicious).

the captains could also not choose some players at all, which is a quite effective way to exclude unwanted players, as admins are often not around, and first have to be convinced, if they did not take part in previous games. if the two are randomly chosen, then it is unlikely that they both not choose a certain player which is actually not annoying.
... except if it is a noob they don't want in their team. :/

if you could possibly do the team picking in-game, that could lead to a solution for some of the mentioned problems.

what problems does it address? how does it solve them? how does it compare to the alternatives?

someone mentioned players being left out, but with the starting already, everyone who wants to play is in.