Quick Intro: We have a flash tetris game finished and we are looking to add multiplayer functionality to the game. After a few days of research on the capabilities of flash and sockets, I've gotten even more confused. A quick disclaimer, I am new to sockets/networking in general.

From what I gathered online, general flash tcp sockets cannot handle peer to peer connections due to the policy system in place. In order for flash to do p2p, one must use a RTMFP-capable server (such as flash media server, etc) to deal with the initial handshakes and from there, flash is able to pass data in a p2p fashion.

Edit: See the first answer for a comprehensive update on the question.