The auto refresh is a pain in the butt. I keep missing out on raids and badge messages because of game auto refreshing in the middle of a battle. I have no plugins or scripts which do this so it has to be the game or something in facebook.

Is auto refresh really required?

Are you seeing game refreshes more often than once every hour or two, on the hour?

i believe the refresh that occurs on the hour is to prevent people from keeping a specific person from their battle tab targetted

I agree, the auto refresh is a real pain. I've even lost base scans (Thus wasting valuable red badges) because of it. But I leave the game open 24 hour a day, so I also expect it.

Sure a better system would be to (Internally) set off a clock when an enemy player is clicked. After an hour, the game locks any buttons, so even if the enemy player is still showing on the screen, you won't be able to attack them. The auto-refresh would no longer be needed then.

The game would have to keep an open connection to know that you still have it up for the time the clock is going , this game only connects to you when you click something and this would make the sever lag and crash from the memory needed to keep track of all the clocks.

not necessarily... javascript can easily do functions based on X amount of time elapsing... it could potentially all be done client-side
(which begs the question... why is dan doing the refresh on the hour then?)