It seems the problem has been fixed now by a patch.
There is a way to get the defender points, but it is still broken in the way it works. One of your cards has to be defender, but then you either have to have your regular shield or improved shield to get the points. (So if you replace shield with barrage or ion turret, the defender card does not work.) This is nonsense, because you DO NOT have to actually deploy the shield to get the defender points. So if the original intent was to only get defender points with the shield, this is broken, and if you don't actually have to use the shield, it's a pointless association of cards. The fact that the defender card says NOTHING about needing a shield has clearly caused a great deal of confusion for players.
