One track on loop definitely isn't a great thing no matter what the track is! Except maybe "Bite The Hand That Feeds" by Nine Inch Nails. But even that one after about 4 hours of writing a chapter...
Anyway, more on topic before I head to bed:
1. Actually, it does stand for Demilitarized Zone! The idea is that it's an area that isn't being protected by firewalls, but it's behind a router. It's an area you can put devices in and they are behind the router as if it were more like a switch instead of a router -- data is transferred, but nothing is protected or blocked at all.
2. Thanks for the tip on
http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/open-ports/ That's going to be super helpful for other players, I imagine. And it definitely confirms the suspicion of the ports simply not being open.
3. The fact that you have such a new cable modem all but guarantees there's a router/firewall on there. I don't know how to configure that either, but it is something you could ask comcast about if you were interested. One fact is that you could simply get rid of your personal router and use theirs instead, if you had the login and password to actually configure their router/modem combo. Then you could set up port forwarding and that would be that -- you'd also have one less router in terms of "hops" between you and the Internet, and that's almost always a good thing.
I have always maintained my own router/firewall as well, but just this December I finally broke down and started using the one from Time Warner. Not much different these days, to be honest, and I didn't have to keep faffing around with the DMZ mode that would get reset every time their modem needed to be reset to factory defaults after hard locking. Anyway, it's up to you, but you could do the same and get in touch with comcast (or even google your router/modem model for the login info, probably) so that you could then take control of your own router. That would make things easier for you in a lot of games, presuming you don't actually need your router.
4. Or you can definitely skip all the hassle and just use Hamachi. I've never actually tried AVWW over the Internet using a personal VPN, so I don't have any idea what that will do to performance. We tried to make it as lag-tolerant as possible in general, though, so fingers crossed.
If you and your friend get a green light connection between each other in Hamachi, that's a pretty direct connection and the most of the overhead is just the encryption to my knowledge. You don't really need your game traffic to be encrypted, so if there's a way to turn that off (have not used Hamachi in some years) then that would save you even more performance.
On the other hand if you wind up with a yellow light in Hamachi, that means that the double-NAT situation actually blocked them from brokering a direct connection between the two of you, and thus they're going to have to be the go-between on the connection. That would mean that a packet leaves your computer, goes to the Hamachi servers, goes to your friend's computer. That's wicked slow and the game might not be playable if all you can get is that yellow light. I honestly don't know how double-NAT affects Hamachi, though, so it might be perfectly fine.
5. Lastly, you do have quite an awesome connection, so presuming that they aren't actually throttling you or having lots of packet loss or doing something else they shouldn't be, you should be good to go. If you get suspicious, you can hit F2 in the game or on the server to see what the packet loss rates are. And you can always use something like speedtest.net to see if you're being throttled. One of my buddies in Massachussets had to keep calling Comcast because they kept throttling him, and it was very frustrating. But this was a few years back, more like 2009.
Anyway, your friends' connections will also be adversely affected by using Hamachi. Not as important as on the server host themselves, but it will still add some overhead. If they're very distant from you or on unreliable connections or whatever else, the encryption in particular can take a bad connection and make it way worse. The reason is how packet resends work, and what winds up happening when you wrapper packets that are supposed to arrive in order -- I'm sure you probably don't want the details, and honestly I don't understand every last detail myself. Just enough to get the idea that it causes an inflated number of resends based on the way that the wrappering is set up. You can also see the resend count in that little F2 menu in the game or on the server.
Odds are fair that Hamachi will probably work fine with this game, but if it's giving you a bad ping I didn't want you to just think that's the way it was or something. You can see the ping between the server and each client in that same F2 menu in the game or on the server.
Hope that helps, and good luck with it!
