Does anyone know how the opponent levels are determined in Explore? Like my level 2 unicorn encountered nothing but level 3 to 7 monsters to battle, the 3's were too much for my unicorn to take on but understandable, except for the fact that most of them were 3's against a 2, but the 7's were too high & I seem to get that a lot when using various lower level pets. I'd rather battle & collect stuff to level up rather than have to pay for 4 hours of training when possible, but when I take out low level pets or even higher pets some of the monsters are too high, like a 19 monster against a 13 or 14 pet. So how is this figured?

I want to say that it's within 5 levels of your pet. So plus or minus; either way.

The thing that sucks with low-level pets is like in the case of a level 2 pet, they don't have pets that are 5 below them, so the range is skewed by the fact that they can only encounted 1 at the minimum and 7 at the maximum so with even probability for any outcome it's going to average towards 3.5 instead of 2 like the level of the player.

Although I could be wrong. The level ranges seem to average towards levels ABOVE the player's pet level as it is so it might not be exactly even chances at any level plus or minus.

Also, I'm not 100% sure it's exactly +/- 5 levels but that is what it seems. I don't think I've ever seen a pet any more or less than 5 away from my pet while exploring.

irrimn, everything is correct, the level range is 5 levels lower and 5 levels higher (the opponent levels on battle arena follow this rule too). The probability of getting any level from this range is equal excluding the case which you already described when newbie pets can't have monsters lower than level 1.