The free codes made the quest access portion of VIP
MORE valuable. This is still a PVE cooperative game. All your guildies, friends and people you could potentially group with now have the same access to content you have. Also, it brought more people to the game for us to play with. Many thanks to the dev team for making these once-exclusive VIP benefits more beneficial to everyone, including VIPs.
Oh, and they did free gold rolls for a year. And the new VIP Loyalty Reward benefits are pretty sweet.