I used hamachi because no one aside from me in my group of friends knew how to port forward, but it didn't work on my network and it took me 4 years to figure out it was because at&t has it's own network on it's dialup modems by default.
They still do that to this day with their fiber modem/routers! I hate it! And even if you do passthrough to have your own up for only your router, your ping is still never below 23ms because there's two stop points in the chain, that and at&t's dns resolution is ass.
Terraria before proper multiplayer support was our prime Hamachi game. We had like 7-8 people from an internet forum playing on and off through our hamachi virtual network.