Basically my question is... Is there a workaround for port forwarding? There must be since some mainstream games dont require the user to forward ports in order to host and get clients connected. It just seems odd to me and I have absolutely no idea how they do it.

Port forwarding is fairly simple (at least to many of us), but there are soooooo many people that have no idea how to do it!

I recently got terraria, forwarded port 7777 to my internal ip and done, server up and im playing with my family and friends. What surprized me was when we wanted to check out other peoples' worlds, most of them have no idea how to forward ports so either their server dosnt work or they require silly workarounds like using hamachi, tunngle, etc...

I must admit many of my friends dont know how to forward ports either and whenever they want to play some old games (like diablo II) usually they ring me up and im the one that has to host for them!

Currently im working on a new 3dgs game and this time I decided im going multiplayer with it (with ANet Pro). So far its looking good but all this got me thinking... What if at some point I think of releasing this time? Port forwarding just started to seem extremely unprofessional to me mainly because of the amount of people that will not be able to host due to the limitations of their own knowledge. I know of many games that dont require port forwarding so there has to be some workaround.

Any ideas?