"Your game client is not up to date..."

Really old player here, and I'm trying to come back / see the new stuff. I downloaded and installed the MSI, first run it downloaded a patch, but after creating a game account it says

"Your game client is not up to date, please run the Launcher to update and play the game."

Trying two more times gives a new message on the third try about three strikes like it's a password error but the password is correct and yes I have a website account and I saw that you have to then create an actual server account to log in to one of the servers, so I did that and that is the account I'm trying to use to log in to Finvarra.

Version info top left on the login screen says 3.279

I uninstalled, reinstalled, made sure wlaunch.exe and sciw.exe were both set to XP SP3 and run as administrator in compatibility. (windows 7 here) - no change

Huzzah, Success!

Turns out the Getting Started guide links to an older installer, RatLabsRealm.msi, and the newest installer from the site's main menu download link is TheRealmOnline.msi.

Installing the newer version was what ended up giving me… the newer version. Who knew.

(Maybe fix that getting start guide.)