Spawn

A spawn is the location where an orb that appears, either for one of the three that appear at the beginning of the game or to replace an orb that has just been scored. The location of a spawn is random and is hypothesized by experts to follow a uniform distribution over a fixed set of locations. More colloquially, the term spawns can also refer to the inherent element of chance that is present in GOP, brought on by the randomness in the locations of the spawned orbs.

Distribution of spawns
The scientific consensus as to the distribution of spawns is that spawns follow a uniform distribution over a fixed set of locations in each altar, in other words, each location in this set is just as likely as any other location to be the location at which the next orb spawns. In particular, the GOP emulator is constructed with the spawns following this distribution.

Other hypotheses include that the distribution is not uniform but rather skewed depending on various factors involving the players on a team, including ping, PID, and past scores. For example, higher skilled players (who have gotten better scores in the past) may have higher probabilities of far spawns and the lower skilled players may have higher probabilities of close spawns. This has not been rigorously verified.

Color Differences
The first three green orbs always spawn northeast of each altar. The yellow orbs always begin spawning "randomly". Other than this, no differences in spawns between the colors are known.

Trivia

 * The set of all tiles where orbs can spawn in the free-to-play altars (Air, Mind, Water, Earth, Fire, and Body) is mostly known through extensive experience and records. However, the spawns for the pay-to-play altars (Nature and Chaos) are not known as extensively as they have not been played to the same extent.